procurement

procurement is an MCP server that lets an AI assistant shop around. One call searches many marketplaces at once and returns offers in a single shape, priced in Australian dollars with shipping included. Every source is a hosted API called with a key; the server contains no scrapers of its own.

Sources

• China: Taobao, Tmall, 1688, Pinduoduo and JD, and AliExpress.
• Australia: eBay, including sold prices, Amazon, and 90 days of Amazon price history.
• Second-hand: Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace.
• Grocery: Woolworths, Coles and ALDI.
• Deals: the OzBargain and Cheapies feeds, which need no key.

Tools

search_offers searches by text and search_by_image by photo. get_offer_detail expands one result, and health reports which sources are configured and answering.

Ranking

Three orderings are offered. Cheapest sorts by landed cost: price times quantity plus shipping, or unit price for groceries, with anything below its minimum order quantity sent to the end. Fastest sorts by delivery estimate. Best value weighs price at a half and speed and trust at a quarter each, where trust comes from community votes, then seller rating, then a default for the kind of source.

Behaviour

Sources are queried in parallel in two lanes. Quick APIs get about ten seconds. Slow ones, mostly the Chinese marketplaces and sold listings, get 95. A source that fails or times out returns a diagnostic entry in place of offers and the rest of the search carries on. Why it never invents results is in A mock fallback presents fiction as results.

A relevance filter requires every query term to appear in a result, added after ALDI’s search matched “milk” to oil and lollipops.

Results can be cached in Postgres for an hour. Without a database the server is stateless.

Getting eBay’s production API switched on took an unexpected extra step, described in An eBay production keyset needs an account-deletion endpoint first.