Trusted Contacts and Duplicate-Link Detection for Sourcing Teams

Put three people on the same sourcing team, each independently browsing 1688 or Alibaba for the same product category, and the same supplier link gets added twice — sometimes three times — almost every week. It's not carelessness. It's what naturally happens when multiple people are hunting the same category in parallel without visibility into what the others have already found.

Why this is more expensive than it sounds

A duplicate sourced product isn't just a wasted row in a sheet. It's duplicate AI translation and description-writing spend on the same product, a duplicate landed-cost calculation, and — worst case — two slightly different listings for the same product going live on the same storefront with inconsistent pricing, because two people priced the same item independently without knowing the other had already done it.

Cross-user detection

BulkFlow checks a newly added supplier link against every sheet across the whole team, not just the current user's own sheet. If someone else on the team already sourced that exact link, the system flags it before it becomes a second row — which means the second person finds out immediately, while they're still looking at the product, rather than weeks later when someone notices two near-identical listings live at the same time.

Trusted Contacts and Groups

This only works if the system knows who's on a team together. Trusted Contacts/Groups is the admin-side setting that defines which users should be checked against each other for duplicates — an office of 5 sourcers working the same categories gets grouped together; a freelancer working on an unrelated project for the same account doesn't need to be cross-checked against them.

This is also the same mechanism that underlies bulk-sending a sheet to a colleague for review, or merging two people's sourcing sessions into one combined batch — the groupings exist once, and get reused across several team workflows rather than being configured separately for each one.

A realistic team scenario

A Mumbai-based team of four sourcing 150-200 products a week across jewellery, home decor and kitchen categories will naturally overlap on 10-15% of what they each independently find in any given week — the categories aren't siloed enough for that not to happen. Catching that overlap before it becomes duplicate work in the sheet, rather than discovering it during an export review, is the difference between a clean weekly batch and a cleanup job nobody budgeted time for.

Start free and set up Trusted Contacts under Settings once more than one person on your team is sourcing.

A concrete weekly-overlap scenario

A four-person sourcing team split loosely across categories — two people mostly working home decor, two mostly working kitchen accessories — will still overlap on products that straddle both categories, or simply get independently discovered by two people browsing the same supplier's storefront on different days. In a typical week sourcing 150-200 products across the team, a 10-15% overlap rate isn't an edge case, it's the expected baseline for any team working related categories without constant real-time coordination.

Each duplicate, caught late, costs more than just a wasted row: duplicate AI translation and description-generation spend on the exact same product, a duplicate landed-cost calculation that should never have needed running twice, and in the worst case, two independently-priced versions of the same product going live on the same storefront with inconsistent pricing — which is exactly the kind of inconsistency that erodes a buyer's trust if they ever notice it.

Why this has to check across the whole team, not just one person's history

A duplicate-check that only looks at a single user's own prior sourcing history misses the entire class of problem this feature exists to solve — because the duplication, by definition, happens between two different people who don't see each other's sheets by default. Checking across the full team's sourced history, scoped by Trusted Contacts/Groups rather than globally across unrelated accounts, is what makes the detection actually useful instead of just technically present.

How this interacts with the review workflow

A duplicate caught at the sourcing stage never even reaches the team review queue as a problem to flag — it's resolved before a project is ever submitted for approval. The two features work best together: duplicate detection prevents one specific class of error early, and review catches the different kinds of mistakes that aren't duplicates at all, like pricing or variant errors.