How directory discovery worksThe five independent questions a buyer can ask, and what each one returns.
This page describes what the site actually does. Any term that has not yet been approved appears here as an open constraint rather than as a policy in force.
Five questions, not one
A buyer looking for agarwood oil has several different questions, and the directory answers them separately. What material is it? Who trades it — a distiller, a wholesaler, a retailer, a perfumery? Where is the business located? What origin of material does it work with? Which destinations is it documented to ship to? Combining these into a single filter was what made the directory misleading: a Dubai company handling Cambodian agarwood would appear under Cambodian production, and a buyer would conclude that Cambodian production was available in Dubai.
Roles are recorded, not inferred
A business record carries its roles as a list of controlled slugs — wholesalers, retailers, growers, distillers and twenty more. The human-readable category on the profile is a summary of those roles, and it is never parsed to work out what the business does. A reworded label would otherwise silently drop a business out of a listing it belongs to.
Each combination has its own address
The filters combine, and each combination is a real page with its own address rather than a redirect or a dead link: a role, a role located in a country, a role located in a city, a role shipping to a destination, a role working with an origin. An address that the site publishes therefore always resolves to the listing it names.
The twenty-four role slugs, the three business records, and the published-route resolver that decides which addresses are served.