The Email That Started It
A few years ago, one of our founders was sitting in the procurement office of a mid-size EMS company in Istanbul. The company had about 40 employees, served dozens of OEM customers, and sourced components from over a hundred suppliers across Asia and Europe. They were good at what they did. Their engineering was solid. Their assembly quality was high. Their supply chain management, on the other hand, was held together with email, Excel, and sheer willpower.
He watched a procurement engineer spend 45 minutes copying part numbers from a customer's BOM into an email template, then send that email to six different suppliers, then create a spreadsheet to track which suppliers had responded, then manually compare the quotes that trickled back over the next three days. When the quotes were finally compiled, the sales team needed the data to build a customer quote --- so the procurement engineer exported the spreadsheet, emailed it across the office, and the sales engineer re-typed the relevant numbers into yet another template.
That was one RFQ cycle. They did dozens every week.
The tools existed to make this better. ERPs had procurement modules. CRMs had sales pipelines. There were standalone RFQ tools, supplier management platforms, and customer portal solutions. But none of them solved the actual problem: this company was both a buyer and a seller, and no single tool handled both directions without feeling like it was designed for one side and had the other bolted on as an afterthought.
That's the gap Gloyd was built to fill.
B2B Is Stuck --- And Everyone Knows It
Here's what surprised us when we started talking to companies in the electronics and industrial supply chain: everyone already knew the problem. Nobody was confused about what was broken. They could describe it in detail.
The Email Problem
RFQs arrive by email. Quotes go out by email. Order confirmations, shipping notifications, price negotiations, revision requests --- all email. A typical procurement team at a 50-person company sends and receives hundreds of supply-chain-related emails per week. Critical information lives in inboxes. When someone goes on vacation, their supplier relationships go dark until they get back. When someone leaves the company, institutional knowledge walks out the door.
The Spreadsheet Problem
Excel is the universal adapter of B2B. Customer BOMs arrive as spreadsheets. Quote comparisons are built in spreadsheets. Order tracking lives in spreadsheets. Price lists are maintained in spreadsheets. The problem isn't that spreadsheets are bad --- they're incredibly flexible. The problem is that they don't connect to anything. Every spreadsheet is an island. Data gets copied between islands manually, and every copy is a chance for errors to creep in.
The Two-System Problem
Companies that have moved beyond email and Excel typically end up with separate tools for purchasing and sales. The procurement team uses one system (or module). The sales team uses another. The two systems don't share data, don't share contacts, and don't share workflows. The result is double data entry, disconnected reporting, and a team of people whose main job is being the human bridge between the buying side and the selling side of the same company.
The Portal Problem
Some companies have invested in customer or supplier portals. But those portals are usually one-directional. A supplier portal lets you manage inbound quotes from suppliers. A customer portal lets your customers submit orders. Getting both? That typically means two separate portal products, two separate implementations, and two separate sets of maintenance headaches.
The "Not Built for Us" Problem
And then there's the deeper issue: most B2B software was built for large enterprises. The pricing assumes thousands of users. The implementation assumes a dedicated IT team. The customization assumes you'll hire a consultant for six months. A 30-person EMS company or a 15-person distributor doesn't have the budget, the staff, or the time for that. They need something that works out of the box, is priced for their scale, and doesn't require a PhD in ERP configuration to set up.
Every company we talked to described some version of these problems. They'd tried various solutions. They'd evaluated ERPs, CRMs, procurement platforms, and portal tools. And they'd concluded --- correctly --- that nothing on the market handled their complete workflow without significant compromise.
What We Built
Gloyd is a B2B procurement software platform designed for companies that both buy and sell. That's the core design principle, and everything else flows from it.
The Workflow Engine
The backbone of Gloyd is a structured workflow that mirrors how B2B transactions actually happen:
RFQ --- You create a request for quotation and send it to suppliers. Or your customer sends one to you through their portal. Either direction, same system.
Quote --- Suppliers respond with pricing. Or you build a quote for your customer. Evaluate, compare, negotiate, revise --- all tracked, all versioned.
Order --- The accepted quote converts to an order. Purchase order to your supplier, or sales order from your customer. The conversion carries forward all the pricing, terms, and line items.
Fulfillment --- Track what's been packed, shipped, and delivered. Both directions. Your supplier's shipments to you, and your shipments to your customer.
This isn't a revolutionary concept. It's just the way B2B works. The difference is that Gloyd runs the whole flow end-to-end, in both directions, in one place, with one set of data. We go deeper on why this matters in One Platform for Both Sides of Every Deal.
Contacts That Understand Relationships
In Gloyd, a contact isn't just a name and an email address. Every contact has a type: customer, supplier, partner, or organization. The type determines what that contact can do and what documents flow in which direction.
A supplier contact receives your purchase RFQs and sends you quotes. A customer contact sends you sales RFQs and receives your quotes. A partner? Both directions --- because in the real world, the same company often buys from you and sells to you.
This relationship model means you don't need separate databases for suppliers and customers. One contact record. One history. One view of everything you've ever transacted with that company.
Portals for Both Sides
Every Gloyd organization can provision portals for their trading partners. Supplier portals let your suppliers receive RFQs, submit quotes, and track purchase orders. Customer portals let your customers browse products, submit RFQs, receive quotes, and track sales orders. Learn more about portal capabilities on the portal features page.
Every portal is branded --- your logo, your colors, your subdomain. Your customers and suppliers see your company, not ours. And because both portal types connect to the same backend, data flows seamlessly between the customer-facing side and the supplier-facing side. Read more about the sales side in Customer Portals: Stop Losing Orders to Email and the procurement side in Supplier Portals: Get Quotes Back Faster.
Portal users are free on every plan. That's a deliberate decision. We don't think you should pay per-seat for your external partners to interact with you. The whole point of portals is to reduce friction, and charging per portal user adds friction.
Products, Stock, and BOMs
The platform includes a product catalog that serves both directions. The same product can appear on a purchase RFQ to a supplier and on a sales quote to a customer. Stock is tracked centrally and fires alerts when inventory drops below your thresholds.
For electronics companies, BOM management connects the dots between what your customer needs and what you need to source. Import a BOM, see its structure and single-source risk, and source the components through the same RFQ workflow that started with your customer's request.
The O2O Network
O2O stands for Organization-to-Organization. It's a secure network that lets Gloyd users exchange B2B documents directly --- RFQs, quotes, orders --- without setting up individual portal relationships first. If your supplier is also on Gloyd, you can send them an RFQ through the network. If your customer is on Gloyd, they can send you an order through the network.
Think of it as the connective tissue between companies on the platform. Portals handle your established relationships. O2O handles ad-hoc document exchange with companies already on Gloyd.
Documents, Notifications, and Activity Logs
Every action is logged. Every document change is tracked. Every status transition triggers appropriate notifications --- in-app, email, or both. When your supplier updates a shipment status, your team sees it immediately. When your customer accepts a quote, the sales team gets notified. When a procurement engineer modifies an RFQ, the change history is preserved.
This isn't glamorous functionality, but it's the kind of thing that makes the difference between a tool people actually use and one that gets abandoned after a month.
Who Gloyd Is For
We built Gloyd for a specific slice of the B2B world: companies in the electronics and industrial supply chain that operate in both directions.
OEM Manufacturers
You design products and outsource manufacturing. You send BOMs to EMS partners, source specialty components directly, and manage relationships with dozens of suppliers. Gloyd handles your outbound purchasing workflow --- RFQs to suppliers, quote evaluation, purchase order management --- while giving your EMS partners and suppliers a portal to interact with you directly.
EMS / ECM Providers
You're the quintessential bidirectional company. OEM customers send you BOMs and orders. You source every component, manage assembly, and ship finished products. Your purchasing volume is driven by your sales volume. Gloyd connects those two sides, so your sales team quotes from the supplier pricing already in the system and your procurement team sees customer demand before it turns into a rush order.
ODM Companies
You design and manufacture products that other companies sell under their own brand. You're buying components and selling finished goods. The design-to-delivery pipeline crosses the buy/sell boundary at every stage, and a bidirectional platform keeps the entire chain visible.
Distributors and Resellers
You buy from manufacturers and sell to end customers. Your margin is the difference between purchase cost and sale price. In Gloyd, both sides of that deal live in the same system, so the spread sits right there on the record. No more reconciling purchase invoices against sales orders at month-end to figure out whether you actually made money.
Industrial Suppliers
Cable assemblies, machined parts, coatings, fasteners --- if you sell configured or semi-custom products and need to source materials for each order, you're operating bidirectionally whether you think of it that way or not. Gloyd makes that flow explicit and manageable.
What Makes Gloyd Different
There are procurement tools. There are sales tools. There are portal platforms. So why build another one?
Bidirectional by Design, Not by Extension
Most platforms start as either a procurement tool or a sales tool, then add the other direction later. That bolt-on approach shows. The data models don't quite fit. The UX is inconsistent. The reporting can't cross the boundary cleanly. Gloyd was architected from the start to handle both directions. Every table in the database has a direction field. Every workflow knows which way the documents flow. It's not an add-on. It's the foundation.
Multi-Tenant, Not Single-Tenant
Gloyd is a true multi-tenant SaaS platform. Each organization gets isolated data (separate database schemas), but shares infrastructure. This means we can offer competitive pricing without requiring on-premise installation or dedicated servers. A 10-person company gets the same platform capabilities as a 200-person company.
Portals as a Core Feature
Portals aren't a premium add-on in Gloyd. They're available on every plan because they're fundamental to how B2B communication should work. Your suppliers and customers interact with you through branded portals --- not through email threads that get lost, not through shared spreadsheets that get corrupted, not through phone calls that nobody documents.
The O2O Network Effect
The more companies that join Gloyd, the more valuable the O2O network becomes. Today, it's a convenient way to exchange documents with partners who are also on the platform. Over time, it becomes a discovery mechanism --- a way to find new suppliers, new customers, and new opportunities within the electronics and industrial supply chain.
Priced for Real Companies
Our pricing starts at $49/month. Not $49 per user per month. Not $49 plus $500 in implementation fees. Not $49 for the basic tier that's missing every feature you actually need. $49/month for the full purchasing workflow with portal access and O2O network connectivity. See the full breakdown on our pricing page.
Where We're Headed
Gloyd is live and actively used by companies across the electronics supply chain. Here's what's coming next, in the order we're building it:
ERP and E-Invoice Connectivity
First in line. For companies with an existing ERP, we're building sync that lets Gloyd coexist with it rather than replace it. Purchase orders created in Gloyd push to your ERP. Inventory updates from your ERP sync back to Gloyd. No rip-and-replace required. E-invoice integration follows right behind, so the orders you close in Gloyd connect cleanly to compliant invoicing.
Distributor Data Integrations
After the ERP and e-invoice phase: direct connections to major component distributors --- live pricing, stock availability, and lead times. When you're building a customer quote, you'll pull current distributor pricing without leaving the platform.
Advanced Analytics
Cross-directional reporting that answers questions like: "Which of my customers generate the most procurement complexity?" or "Which suppliers are most critical to my highest-margin products?" These are questions that require data from both the buying and selling sides --- exactly the kind of insight a bidirectional platform is uniquely positioned to provide.
Mobile Access
B2B doesn't happen only at a desk. Procurement engineers visit supplier facilities. Sales reps meet customers on-site. We're building mobile capabilities so the critical approval, review, and communication workflows are accessible from anywhere.
International Expansion
Gloyd ships in Turkish and English today, built to take on additional languages and regional compliance requirements. We're expanding to serve companies across Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia --- the regions where electronics manufacturing and distribution are growing fastest.
The Honest Version
We're not going to pretend Gloyd does everything. It doesn't replace your accounting software. It doesn't do CAD/CAM. It's not a full ERP and we're not trying to make it one. What it does --- and what it does well --- is handle the B2B transaction layer: the RFQs, quotes, orders, and fulfillment tracking that sit at the heart of every buyer-seller relationship.
If your company spends significant time managing the flow of commercial documents between you and your trading partners, and if you operate on both the buying and selling sides, Gloyd was built for exactly your use case.
We've been in the electronics supply chain long enough to know that the industry doesn't need another tool that promises to do everything. It needs a tool that handles the core transaction workflow cleanly, in both directions, without requiring a six-month implementation project to get started.
That's what Gloyd is.
Try It Yourself
Every Gloyd account starts with a 14-day free trial. Pick your plan, set up your organization, and start inviting your suppliers and customers. No credit card required during the trial. No sales calls unless you want one.
If you want to see the platform in action before committing, request a walkthrough. We'll show you the full bidirectional workflow with real examples relevant to your industry.
If you already know this is what you've been looking for, sign up now and start building your B2B network today. Setup takes minutes, not months.
We built Gloyd because we saw a gap that nobody was filling. The B2B procurement software market had tools for buyers and tools for sellers, but nothing for companies that are both. If that's you, we'd like to show you what's possible when both sides of every deal live in the same platform.
Get started or talk to our team.
