How nanoMani works
Four mechanisms, drawn rather than described: how a specification becomes a listing, what stands between a supplier and the catalogue, what the checkout charges and what it deliberately leaves the seller to quote, and who gets the last of a batch when two labs want it at once.
If you would rather read it by role, there is a page for each — buyers and researchers, sellers and suppliers, and four more.
The catalogue
A listing is a specification, not a photograph
A general marketplace stores a name, a price and a picture, and everything a chemist needs to know ends up buried in a paragraph of prose. That does not survive contact with nanomaterials. A multi-walled nanotube is decided by its outer diameter, its length and how much ash is left when you burn it. A core-shell quantum dot is decided by emission wavelength, the width of that peak, and quantum yield. Those two vocabularies share no field at all — and neither does the next material.
So there is no purity column here, and no diameter column. Every listing carries an open list of key-and-value rows in the order the seller put them in, as many as the material warrants, named in the supplier's own words. Nothing is normalised, averaged or embellished by us. What you read on a product page is what the supplier committed to in writing, which is the only version worth quoting in a method section.
A supplier with a hundred of them does not fill in a hundred forms. The bulk import takes one spreadsheet cell — Purity:95%|Outer Diameter:10-20 nm — and splits it into rows, so a catalogue arrives in one upload with its specifications intact.
Browse the catalogue, see the specification ranges each material family is quoted in, or what those grades cost.
Trust
Two approvals stand between a supplier and the catalogue
The first gate is the account. An application is three fields — the company or lab, what they make or distribute, and a website if there is one — and it is read by a person rather than scored by a machine. That takes two to three business days, and the answer comes either way. Until it does, the account can do everything a buyer can and nothing a seller can, and that permission is re-read from the database on every privileged action rather than trusted from a sign-in token that may be a month old.
The second gate is the listing. Being an approved supplier is not permission to publish: each individual product is approved before it appears. The shop, the site search and the sitemap all use one definition of “the catalogue”, so an unapproved listing is not merely hidden from browsing — it is never handed to a crawler either. And it runs backwards as well as forwards: suspending a seller disables the account and unpublishes every listing it has, in the same write, rather than leaving live products behind a closed account.
What that check is: a person confirming that a supplier and their specifications are real, which filters out relabellers and category spam. What it is not: laboratory verification of anybody's chemistry, and we do not present it as one. Ask for the certificate of analysis before you order — they are not hosted on the site yet — and where the result matters, have the batch characterised independently.
Suppliers: apply here. It costs nothing to apply and nothing to list — a commission on completed orders, between 10% and 5% depending on plan, published in full on the pricing page and recorded on every order at the rate in force when it was placed.
Paying
What the checkout charges, and what it deliberately does not
Your browser sends two values into the checkout: a coupon code, and the name of a payment gateway. Not a price, not a discount, not a total. Everything else is re-derived on our server from the cart as it stands in the database at that moment — because a browser is a thing anybody can edit, and a total that arrives as a form field is a total somebody will eventually set to a number of their own choosing.
Then there are the two lines that stay at zero, and they are the real difference between this checkout and a general one. There used to be a flat $15 shipping rate and a flat 8 % tax here; both were deleted rather than corrected. Freight for these goods is decided by weight, volume, destination and hazard class — a 100 mg vial of quantum dots and a 25 kg drum of industrial graphene are not the same parcel, and Ohio is not Chennai — and any tax depends on where the supply happens. So the checkout charges for the goods, and the seller quotes carriage and applicable tax against your real consignment and invoices it before dispatch. You see that number before it is charged.
The total is then presented in the currency your statement will actually show: dollars through PayPal, or rupees through Cashfree, converted once at a rate that is written onto the order and never re-derived. Card details are entered on the payment provider's own page; nanoMani never sees or stores a card number.
The shipping policy sets out who is responsible for freight, customs and dangerous-goods documentation, and returns gives you fourteen days from delivery to raise a problem.
Stock
What “in stock” means when there are sixty grams in the world
Two labs want fifty grams from a batch of sixty, and they click within the same second. On a lot of software both of them succeed: each request reads the stock, sees sixty, decides fifty is fine, and writes. The supplier finds out afterwards, and one of the two gets an apology instead of a material.
Here the condition lives inside the write. One statement decrements the stock only where enough of it is still there, so the database — not our code — decides which of the two callers changed a row. The winner's order proceeds. The loser is told at the moment they click that there is not enough, and nothing was written on their behalf at all.
The claim is then recorded as a row of its own. Placing an order here is a sequence of separate writes rather than one atomic block, because the database this runs on has no interactive transactions — so that ledger is what makes an interrupted checkout recoverable instead of quietly eating a batch nobody can account for.
And stock is claimed when the order is created, not when it is paid for, so an abandoned payment would otherwise hold real material hostage. After sixty minutes an unpaid order is reconciled: the gateway is asked what happened, and only its answer releases the stock. Never our own records alone — a payment we have not been told about is not the same thing as a payment that did not happen, and we learned that from one that had succeeded.
Where to go from here
This page is about the machinery. These are the pages written for the decision you are actually making.
If you are buying
The buyer's workflow, end to end, and eight questions answered in full.
If you are selling
What a storefront gives you, how orders arrive, and how you are paid.
Apply to sell
Three fields and a person reads it. No listing fee, no subscription.
What it costs
Commission by plan, and what a membership includes, from the same numbers the invoice uses.
The catalogue
Everything currently listed, with the specification fields on every page.
What materials cost
Price bands by material and grade, and the five things that move them.
Questions about the mechanism
Who decides what appears in the nanoMani catalogue?
A person, at two separate moments. A supplier's application is read by hand before the account can list anything at all, which takes two to three business days and gets an answer either way. Then each individual listing is approved before it appears — being an approved supplier is not permission to publish. The shop, the site search and the sitemap all use the same definition of the catalogue, so an unapproved listing is not merely hidden from browsing: it is never submitted to a search engine either. Suspension closes both at once, disabling the account and unpublishing every listing it has.
Where do the specifications on a nanoMani listing come from?
From the supplier, as structured rows rather than as prose. There is no fixed set of specification columns and there could not be one: a multi-walled nanotube is described by outer diameter, length and ash content, a core-shell quantum dot by emission wavelength, peak width and quantum yield, and the two sets share no field. Each listing carries as many key-and-value rows as the material warrants, in the order the seller chose and in the seller's own vocabulary, with nothing normalised or rewritten by nanoMani. Certificates of analysis and safety data sheets are not hosted on the site yet — ask the supplier for them before you order rather than after.
What does my browser actually send when I place an order?
A coupon code, if you have one, and the name of the payment gateway you chose. Nothing else. Every number — the line prices, the subtotal, the discount, the total, the converted amount and the exchange rate used to get there — is derived on the server from your cart as it stands in the database at that moment. The shipping and tax lines are recorded at zero on purpose, because the seller quotes them against your real consignment and invoices them separately before dispatch.
If two labs order the last of a batch at the same moment, what happens?
One of them gets it and the other is told immediately. The stock condition lives inside the write itself — a single statement that decrements the stock only where enough of it remains — so the database decides which order changed a row, rather than two requests each reading the same number and both proceeding. The unsuccessful order writes nothing at all and the buyer sees an insufficient-stock message at the moment they click, not a confirmation followed by an apology.
If I start a payment and never finish it, is the material held forever?
No. Stock is claimed when the order is created, so it is held while you are paying — but an order still unpaid after sixty minutes is reconciled. The payment gateway is asked what actually happened, and only if the gateway says the money is not coming is the stock released and the order cancelled. It is never cancelled on nanoMani's own records alone: a payment we have not been told about is not the same thing as a payment that did not happen.
Is nanoMani the seller?
No. Each listing belongs to the supplier whose name is on it and on their own storefront page, and that supplier packs the consignment, produces the documentation, quotes the freight, ships it, and is responsible for compliant labelling and dangerous-goods paperwork. nanoMani runs the catalogue, the checkout and the payment, records a published commission on completed orders, and does not act as the shipper or arrange freight.
Before you order: know what you are buying
The approval gates above check that a listing is what it says it is. These check that what it says is what you need — written for the person who has to defend the material choice in a methods section.
How to read a certificate of analysis
What a CoA states, what it merely implies, and which numbers on it are measurements rather than specifications.
Phase purity and crystallite size by XRD
Phase identification against the ICDD database, the Scherrer equation, and what a diffractogram can and cannot settle.
Particle size in suspension by DLS
Hydrodynamic size, polydispersity and zeta potential — and why a DLS number and a TEM number describe different things.
Where we are today
Everything above is built and running. What is not yet large is the catalogue — nanoMani is a new marketplace and it is being assembled supplier by supplier, which is precisely why a sourcing request is worth sending: an enquiry for a material nobody has listed yet is the strongest signal there is about which supplier to approach next.
Write to admin@nanomani.com with a specification and a quantity and a person will answer — the same person who reads the seller applications.