Volition — launched in 2022 as a comprehensive hardware components e-marketplace — has expanded its search offering to the industrial channel.

The San Francisco-based company announced Sept. 10 that it has opened its new Power Search platform that scours the entire internet for industrial products and leverages AI to let users find, understand and compare them across all suppliers in seconds — ultimately providing time and cost savings compared to manual searching.

Volition noted that search engines like Google and Amazon don’t perform well with searches for industrial products since they aren’t designed to handle complex specifications, leading to a tedious process of searching many different individual supplier sites that typically have poor search functionality, followed by comparing inconsistent product listings.

Key features:

• Meanwhile, Volition’s Power Search system is specifically designed for technical specifications done in the industrial channel. For example, a part number search on the system will return a list of every supplier offering that product online with pricing, lead time and other intangibles organized and sortable to instantly compare across suppliers.
• Volition notes that the system is albe to understand that a query is for a product by specifications (e.g. “NEMA 23 stepper motor over 100 oz-in torque”), and will then return products that fully match every requirement, as well as partial matches that may be acceptable while being cheaper or faster to ship.
• Unlike general purpose AI tools like ChatGPT, Power Search exhaustively searches for parts across the internet and then condenses all the product info into a table that is far more accurate and easier to use than an AI chat interface.
• According to Volition, its benchmarking shows that its search takes 5-10 seconds to return search results that would otherwise require over an hour of searching on Google, Amazon and supplier websites.
• After users find the parts they need, they can then checkout with a credit card, request an RFQ, or pay by purchase order on net 30 terms across any supplier. Volition’s 7 day-a-week team then handles the supplier setup and order management.

This product has been in private testing with customers, and Volition is now releasing it to the public.

“Power Search is the first time AI has been harnessed for industrial part search, and the enthusiasm from early customers has been overwhelming,” Volition CEO Nick Pinkston told MDM. “We’re excited to share this with the broader world, as it’s looking like a real game changer.”

Volitions marketplace has a catalog of more than 49 million products listed from over 9,000 manufacturers.

Learn much more info about Volition’s Power Search at GoVolition.com