Intent Matching: Buy and Sell Intents That Actually Find Each Other
How the platform suggests matches between active buy intents and live listings — without spamming everyone with everything.
A market with thousands of listings and dozens of buyers is great in theory and useless in practice if buyers can’t find what they want. Intent matching is the platform’s answer: buyers state what they want (the intent), the platform watches for matches against published listings, and surfaces them quietly — not as spam.
Buy intents
A buy intent (/market/intents/create) declares: category (laptops, servers, mobile), grade range (A–C), quantity range (50–200), price ceiling, region constraint, and a free-text note for anything that doesn’t fit a column. The intent is stored, indexed, and matched against new listings in near-real-time.
The match
When a new listing publishes that satisfies an intent’s criteria, the buyer gets a notification (preferences-respecting, see notifications article). Match scores are computed: an exact-grade exact-quantity match scores higher than a partial. The match record (/market/matches/[id]) shows what matched and why.
Auto-match on listing publish
Triggered when a listing publishes, the F1 auto-match RPC runs the intent-table against the new listing and writes match rows for the qualifying intents. The buyer can act on the match (open a deal room, watchlist, dismiss). The seller sees how many active intents matched their listing, which is the kind of feedback that helps with pricing decisions.
Intent-funnel analytics
The Dashboard's intent funnel widget shows how many intents are active, how many got matches, how many converted to deals, how many of those closed. The category breakdown tells the seller where demand is strongest, and the time-of-day analytics tell them when buyers are actually looking.