SOP 10IndustryIntermediate10 steps

Find retailers likely to stock your product

For DTC brands: retailers, distributors and boutiques, classified by whether their range competes with yours or complements it.

2 steps not yet verified live

Tool names and credit costs in this recipe are validated. Some steps work around a platform gap that has not been decisively probed, so treat those as a workaround rather than a documented capability. Check the result before you act on it.

Where the list comes from

Retail directories, marketplaces and stockist pages, sourced by product category.

The steps

  1. 1

    Orient

    Confirm the inputs, compute the expected cost, and tell the user what the run will do before anything spends a credit.

  2. 2

    Source retail buyers

    Deep Search is under-rated here. If the brand already has one retailer that performs, seeding from it finds lookalikes far more efficiently than category scraping. Ask for their best existing stockist before anything else.

  3. 3

    Extract store fields

    Needed: store name, website, location, category, product focus. Gate: website present for most rows. Step 4 cannot classify a store with no site, and those rows will have to be dropped or researched at extra cost.

  4. 4

    Normalize and dedup

    Clean Company Names (0.1c), Normalize Website URL (0.1c), Clean Location (0.1c), Check Domain Status (FREE). deduplicate_auto on domain.

  5. 5

    Classify product fit: similar vs complementary

    Workaround

    No product-range or merchandising classifier. Nothing inspects what a store actually sells and compares it to a supplied product. This is the core intelligence of the workflow and is entirely a prompt today.

  6. 6

    Remove irrelevant retailers

    A premium brand in a budget store devalues both.

  7. 7

    Enrich the business

    Company Headcount (0.2c), Company Annual Revenue (1c), store size proxies purchasing power. Company Social Media Links (2c), for retail, an active Instagram is a better health signal than a website.

  8. 8

    Retail fit score

    Gate: read 5 justifications; each should name a real category seen on the site.

  9. 9

    Segment by retailer type

    Free filter groups: Boutique / Chain / Distributor / Marketplace.

  10. 10

    Run the shared outbound tail

    Personas: by segment as above. Find People Agent (3c), buyer titles vary wildly across retail and a fixed list will miss most of them.

Where the run should stop

  • Product fit classification, similar versus complementary, runs before scoring. It is the decisive step.
  • Irrelevant retailers are removed rather than scored low.

What you should end up with

Retailers segmented by type, each classified on product fit, with a buyer contact and a retail fit score.