On paper, the intermediary's job is simple: take the demand from the customer, find the price at the supplier, add your margin, sell. In practice, every deal lives in two separate worlds — the customer side in one spreadsheet, the supplier side in another — held together by the memory of whoever runs the deal.
This playbook is about the three tools that move that memory into a system: forward, split, and merge — plus the two things built on top of them, margin and source hiding.
First, a photo of the problem
A ten-line customer RFQ arrives. Three lines are supplier A's territory, five are B's, two only C carries. You write three separate emails, then hand-match the returning quotes to the customer's lines. Meanwhile the customer changes quantities on two lines. Do you remember which supplier was asked about which revision?
That's the hidden cost of intermediation: not the price spread, but the matching labor and the broken chain of traceability.
Forward: carry the demand as-is
The simplest case: you'll ask one supplier for the customer's RFQ, unchanged. Forwarding does exactly that — it creates a supplier RFQ that inherits the lines, and keeps the two documents linked. When the supplier's quote comes back, nobody asks which customer demand it belongs to; the chain is on the record.
When to use it: single-source deals, fast-turnaround requests, plain "get the price, add the margin, reply" days.
Split: route lines to the right source
When ten lines can't be solved by one supplier, you split the demand line by line: three lines to A, five to B, two to C — each its own supplier RFQ, all tied to the parent demand. As quotes return, each line's answers land in place, and you pick a winner per item, not per document.
When to use it: long line lists, specialized suppliers, "nobody can quote this whole thing alone" situations.
Merge: ask once for scattered demand
The mirror image of splitting: overlapping lines from different customers (or different requests from the same one) get gathered into a single supplier RFQ. You ask the supplier once; the returning quote fans back out to every linked demand. When volume merges, so does your negotiating position.
When to use it: the same part requested across multiple jobs; periodic consolidated buying.
Margin: retire the calculator
The supplier said 100; you'll say 115. Doing that arithmetic by hand, per line, is the intermediary trade's oldest and most expensive habit — one typo gives the job away. In the flow, markup is defined on top of the winning quote; the customer-facing price is computed for you, and your margin never appears on customer documents.
Source hiding: insurance on the relationship
An intermediary exists because it knows both sides; both sides knowing each other is how the business ends. The flow solves this structurally: the quote to the customer goes out under your name; supplier and customer work in separate portals and see only their own documents. Confidentiality stops being a matter of attention and becomes system behavior.
End to end: anatomy of one deal
- The customer RFQ arrives through your portal as a structured document.
- You forward it whole, or split it across suppliers; merge it with overlapping demand when that helps.
- Supplier quotes return linked to the original demand; you pick winners line by line.
- You set the markup and send one clean quote, under your own name.
- Approval comes through the portal; the order chain is on record in both directions — audit day included.
In Gloyd this toolkit is part of the Enterprise plan; the full flow lives on the intermediaries & trading companies page, and the broader two-direction story on trade flow.
For intermediaries, leaving the two-spreadsheet life isn't a luxury. It's how the margin protects itself.
