Scattered supply
What is Scattered supply?
The listings, prices, people or content a customer wants to find already exist, but they are spread across many separate sites, venues, records or intermediaries, and no shared place gathers them for search or comparison.
How Scattered supply works
Gathering scattered options in one place can lower search costs and draw in both the people searching and the people being found. It does not by itself establish who controls the supply or whether a gatherer can keep it.
Case studies tagged with Scattered supply
Each link opens the passage tagged with this concept.
- Ancestry.com
- Doximity
- Etsy
- Farfetch
- GoodRx
- HomeAway
- Kayak
- OpenTable
- Sermo
- Tripadvisor
- Trulia
- ZoomInfo
The question to ask of a company
What is the customer trying to find or compare, where is it spread, and what does searching across those sources cost?
Examples
- LinkedIn: recruiters could not see qualified professionals who were not actively job hunting.
- Trulia: home listings were spread across thousands of broker sites, local databases and newspapers.
- GoodRx: each pharmacy and discount network showed only its own prescription price.
Who names it
| Author | What they call it / where it appears |
|---|---|
| Strategy Canon + | Editorial pattern label derived from the company entry studies (Oct 2026 Arena review) |
Note. Distinguish from Information asymmetry (one side knows more about quality or risk) and Limited local selection (location limits what inventory is reachable). A company can have more than one of these.