About Quodaris
Visibility where shortlists are made.
Quodaris is a supplier directory for the manufacturing industry in Europe. Buyers use it free of charge to build a shortlist. Companies pay to be visible in that phase, and for nothing else.
Why does this directory exist?
Because supplier directories are where technical buyers start, and because most of the decision is made before anyone picks up the phone.
- 48 % use a supplier directory to find a new supplier, ahead of search engines at 47 %. It is the most common route of all.
- 64 % of the buying journey happens online before a European technical buyer contacts a supplier. Worldwide the figure is 62 %.
- 23 % of first contacts with a sales team happen for one reason only: someone wants to check something they found online.
- 4.3 out of 10 is how far European technical buyers trust answers from AI tools, the lowest score of any region. Good buyers check the market before they trust a shortlist.
None of this is new. Long before Quodaris existed, our founder surveyed 44 technical buyers for her degree thesis. Asked to rank their online sources, they put supplier search engines and online directories second, right after manufacturers’ own websites and ahead of the websites of industry magazines.
“Quodaris does not come from a market gap somebody described to me. It comes from a page in my own thesis that I read too quickly.”
Sources: 2026 State of Marketing to Engineers, published March 2026 by GlobalSpec and TREW Marketing with Elektor. Buying journey n = 709, first contact n = 708, trust in AI answers n = 572, of whom 31 % are in Europe. That publisher sells advertising to the audience it surveys, which is worth knowing when you read the figures. And “Von Katalogen zu Klicks”, published March 2024 by ECC Köln (IFH Köln) with dotSource, an online survey of 308 people involved in procurement at manufacturing companies, this question n = 284. The thesis survey: 44 technical buyers in Germany, all from the customer database of one manufacturer.
Why does being known matter?
Because in manufacturing the shortlist is built before anyone makes contact.
70 %
of technical buyers say they would probably choose the brand they already know, when two solutions look technically similar.
Source: 2026 State of Marketing to Engineers, n = 708. 13 % said very likely and 57 % said likely. A third of those asked said they decide on specification, price and performance alone.
Being known is not the same as being contacted. It decides who gets onto the shortlist in the first place.
What does visibility cost in manufacturing?
More than most people outside marketing expect, and it does not last long.
| Form of visibility | What it costs | How long you are visible |
|---|---|---|
| A stand at one trade fair | around 30,000 €a normal stand of 25 to 30 m² | three to five days |
| A half-page advertisement in an industry magazine | around 3,000 €one insertion | one issue |
| A company profile in a directory | an annual subscriptionsee pricing | every day of the year |
This is not an argument against trade fairs or industry magazines. It is an argument about cost structure. They do different jobs, and they do not compete for the same budget line.
Typical figures from twenty years of industrial marketing budgets, not market averages from a study.
What can a paid profile promise?
That your company is easy to find and easy to quote. Not that an AI assistant will name you.
- Easy to find. A structured page for your company that search engines can index, written in full sentences rather than keywords.
- Easy for machines to read. Schema markup with your company data, checked rather than guessed.
- Easy to quote. By search engines and by AI systems alike, because the answers are written as answers.
What nobody can promise is the result. Rand Fishkin of SparkToro, quoted in the same report, puts it plainly: ask ChatGPT or Google’s AI to rank the top suppliers in a category a hundred separate times, and there is less than a 1 in 100 chance that any two answers name the same brands. These systems are reliable on single facts and almost random on lists of recommendations. Anyone who sells you a place in an AI answer is selling something they cannot deliver.
Being quotable is something we can build. Being quoted is not something we can sell.
What does Quodaris not do?
Sell your interest
No company listed here is told who looked at its profile. Not as a feature, not as a free extra, not on request. We never sell or share who looked at what, and nobody is paid to turn a visit into a phone call.
Sell leads
Quodaris earns money from listing subscriptions and from nothing else. No lead fees, no commission, no share of anyone’s revenue. Visibility is the product. It is the whole product.
Cold-call you
We do not sell by phone. If we get in touch about a listing, we do it in writing, and one reply from you is enough to stop it.
Buyers can search the whole directory without signing up. An account only saves a shortlist, and no supplier ever learns who put them on one. These rules come from years of seeing how other directories work, from both sides, and that part is further down.
Where do the profiles come from?
Some were written by the companies themselves. Others we researched from public sources, before the company had the chance to take the profile over. Every profile says which of the two it is.
Where that information comes from, what a person checks by hand, what we leave out on purpose and how results are ordered is set out on its own page, in full, rather than summarised here.
Who is responsible for this?
Maria Strauß, who founded Quodaris in 2024 after twenty years in and around industrial companies, sixteen of them in marketing.
- Trained as an industrial clerk at a manufacturer, with much of that time spent in marketing, from the company’s website relaunch to a final project on a marketing topic.
- Several years at an SEO agency in Cologne, starting in web design and later running the agency’s own marketing.
- 12.5 years in sole charge of marketing for the German-speaking market of an internationally active industrial manufacturer, working alongside the parent company abroad.
- A degree in media management, studied part-time while that job carried on.
- Certified in inbound marketing by HubSpot Academy and in conversion optimisation by ConversionBoosting. A directory depends on whether buyers find it and whether a profile page answers their question, so that is the part of the craft that matters here.
For most of those 12.5 years her employer was listed in supplier directories. Those listings were her responsibility: which directories, what went into the entries, keeping them current, and the budget. She signed the renewals herself.
She has seen what those directories do to the people at the other end, from both sides. When colleagues in purchasing looked at other suppliers’ entries, the calls that followed went to them. And anyone who wanted to sell something to marketing was put through to her directly: stand builders, hostess agencies, interpreters, advertising sales, promotional products. Some of them rang after she had only looked at their website. That is where the three rules at the top of this page come from.
How do you reach us?
Write to us. A person reads it, and the same person answers it.
If your company is already in the directory and something about it is wrong, the quickest way is the link on the profile itself, because it carries the reference to that profile with it. Claiming, correcting or removing a profile is explained step by step.
- Maria Strauß, founder
- [email protected]
- Company and legal matters
- [email protected], including the contact point for users under Article 12 DSA