Independent verification, on your side of the table and paid only by you — through structured RFQs, factory checks, negotiation, and first order.
Qualifying a Turkish supplier means establishing, before any order, who will actually manufacture the goods, and then verifying both the contracting entity and the manufacturing one: registration and trade-registry checks, export history, certification against your actual specification, capacity relative to your volumes, reference orders in comparable markets, and a factory visit where the order value or the specification warrants one. Legitimate traders, authorised agents and contract manufacturers are all workable counterparties — what is not workable is not knowing which you are dealing with. Qualification closes when you can compare like with like: RFQs structured on a single comparable basis, so the quotes that come back can be set beside each other.
What follows qualification is the sourcing mandate rather than the answer to this question — negotiation, and then DDP routing, VAT, CBAM exposure and customs classification through first sample and first order. Specialist trade, tax and customs work inside that is coordinated with licensed advisers and separately scoped where required.
The reason it is worth doing from inside the market is that important parts of supplier capability and counterpart identity are harder to establish reliably from outside it. Plenty is externally verifiable — registration, certification records, published reference work. What travels badly is which entity actually manufactures, and whether stated capacity and delivery discipline survive contact with your specification. In our sourcing work, the companies easiest to find in English have frequently not been the ones with the capacity, the certification or the delivery discipline. Kickoff runs that side for you as the buyer. You pay us and only you pay us — no supplier commission, no referral fee, no hidden markup — and in each engagement we represent one side and say which at the start.
Search, directories and trade platforms in Türkiye reward marketing effort, not manufacturing capability. Across the supplier searches we have run, a recurring share of what surfaced first in English was a trading company, an agent, or a manufacturer quoting outside its actual competence. None of that is visible from a website, and buyers who arrive without help commonly spend the opening months of a programme discovering it through failed samples and missed dates.
The second problem is quote comparability. Three quotes for the same part will differ on incoterm, on tolerance, on what is included in tooling, on lead time definition and on what happens when volume changes. Comparing the headline numbers compares nothing. Most of the value in a sourcing engagement is created before any negotiation, in the structure of the RFQ.
This is the question a serious buyer asks first, and it deserves a direct answer rather than a reassurance. When a buyer retains us for sourcing, our only fee comes from the buyer. No supplier commission, no referral fee, no margin inside the price. You see the supplier names and the quotes, and you own the relationship — including after the engagement ends. In each job we represent one side, and we say which at the start. We check conflicts before every engagement and decline anything that conflicts.
That is a different business model from a broker, and it produces a different shortlist. A commission-paid intermediary has a structural reason to prefer some suppliers over others. We are paid the same regardless of who you choose, so the shortlist has nothing riding on it beyond fit. What one of our lists actually looks like, redacted, is published here.
1,200+ companies screened · 170+ named decision-makers contacted · 40+ markets covered. Internal counts from completed client work, June 2026.
The same work runs in the other direction for companies establishing a commercial presence, appointing a distributor or partner, or testing whether Türkiye is a market before committing to it. Named targets, the route to the decision-maker, first conversations, commercial review of distribution and partner agreements — who does what, who pays, who carries the risk — and a clear go or no-go. A six-week go/no-go can be scoped, and a clean no reached inside it is a good outcome.
Company registration and trade-registry checks, export history, certification against your actual specification, capacity relative to your volumes, reference orders in comparable markets, and a factory visit where the specification or the order value warrants one. The step most buyers skip is confirming that the company quoting is the company manufacturing — agents and trading companies quote freely in this market.
No. When a buyer retains us, the buyer is the only party who pays us — no supplier commission, referral fee or hidden markup. You see supplier names and quotes directly and you own the relationship. In each engagement we represent one side and disclose which at the start.
On our own engagements, an initial screened shortlist against a clear specification has taken two to four weeks. Structured RFQs, comparison and negotiation add several weeks depending on how quickly suppliers respond and whether samples are required. Factory verification depends on location and scheduling. The variable that moves the timeline most is the quality of the specification you start with.
Yes — DDP routing, VAT registration, GTIP and customs classification, and CBAM exposure where the goods fall within scope, coordinated with licensed counsel and customs brokers where required. It is worked into the sourcing engagement rather than treated as a separate problem that appears after the supplier has been chosen.
If you are choosing between three Turkish quotes you cannot properly compare, the problem is the RFQ — and it is fixable before you negotiate anything.
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