Intent Matching: Buy Intents That Actually Find Listings

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: a buyer states what they want (the intent signal), the platform scores it against published listings, and surfaces the fits quietly on the intent itself — not as spam.

Intent signals

The wizard at /market/intents/create has three steps. Step one is type and criteria: buying or selling, the company, categories, manufacturers, minimum and maximum grade, minimum and optional maximum quantity. Step two is preferences: urgency, a maximum price per unit (buy) or minimum price per unit (sell), a minimum data-security grade, preferred regions, whether accessories are required, whether only fresh grading counts, the expiry period, auto-renew, and notes for whatever does not fit a column. Step three reviews and publishes. Intents live on /market/intents with buy/sell and status filters, and can be paused, resumed or cancelled from their page.

The match

Matching runs for buy intents: the engine scores each intent against public, published listings on category, manufacturer, model, grade, price, quantity, data security and region. Sell intents are recorded and listed with the same wizard; the scoring engine works from the demand side. A match row is written per intent-listing pair with its score and strength, and the match list at /market/matches shows them all with score-bucket and status filters and counts for hot, new and converted matches. The match page behind each row is the explanation: criteria breakdown, deal potential, score weights, timeline. The actions — open the listing, dismiss, start a deal — live on the match row on the intent’s own page, /market/intents/[id], which is where a buyer works through their matches anyway.

Auto-match on listing publish

When a listing publishes, the auto-match routine runs the active intents against it and writes match rows for the ones that qualify. Intents that governance has paused, flagged or disabled are skipped; throttled ones are matched at lower priority (see the intent-governance article). A buyer can also press Run matching on an intent to score it now rather than wait for the next publish. The seller sees the matching intents on the item page in Market inventory, which is the kind of demand feedback that helps with pricing decisions.

Intent-funnel analytics

The dashboard’s Intent Funnel widget shows active intents, how many got matches, how many of those became deals, and how many closed won. Match Performance adds match counts, hot rate and conversion; Top Categories shows where the units are being listed. Different drop-offs point at different problems: “we get matches but they don’t convert” and “we don’t get matches at all” are not fixed the same way.