New in the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide: Offer Types for Services, Software, and More

The initial thought behind this was that we wanted to create a better offer for those offering certain services — for example, development services in specific technical areas such as spectroscopy. With our previous system, this did not work well — for the following reasons:

• A company offering, say, development services in spectroscopy couldn’t easily be listed.
• We had the category “spectroscopy equipment” — but that was clearly hardware-only.
• In principle, we could have created service-specific categories such as “consulting on spectroscopy”, but that would have led to hundreds of rarely used categories, many without a single supplier, and usually without an Encyclopedia article generating traffic.
• On the other hand, our general service categories like “design and consulting services” are rather broad.

Another problem was that people searching for such things may not think about our Buyer's Guide.

Now we have found an excellent solution, solving all these problems:

• We have introduced the following offer types (with their symbols shown on supplier pages):
  • ⚙ hardware
  • 🛠 fabrication equipment
  • ✨ component processing
  • 🧩 accessories & parts
  • 🧴 consumables
  • 🔧 maintenance, repair (includes processing, e.g. polishing services, and alignment)
  • 📏 metrology, calibration, testing (includes services and instruments)
  • 💡 consulting (includes design, modeling, compliance, feasibility studies, market research, patent development, system integration, installation, recruiting)
  • 🛠 development (includes design and prototyping)
  • 🎓 training
  • 💻 software
  • 📚 publication (books, journals, market reports, conferences, webinars)
• For each category, one or more offer types can now be selected. For example, one supplier may offer spectroscopy hardware and consumables, another one consulting and training on spectroscopy.
• We renamed various categories to reflect that wider scope; for example, “spectroscopy equipment” just became “spectroscopy”, “laser welding machinery” became “laser welding”, etc.
• We removed some narrow service categories like “training on laser safety”; instead, one can now use the category “laser safety” (where hardware is also offered) plus the general category “training courses”.
• A new filter by offer type makes it easy to display exactly what you want — hardware with accessories, or consulting and training only, for example.

The Buyer’s Guide now accommodates a much broader spectrum of offers, including:

• consulting or training on specialized topics such as photodetection or laser safety: 💡 consulting🎓 training
• repair services for specific hardware (e.g. lamp-pumped lasers): 🔧 maintenance, repair
• metrology services or hardware for specific components (e.g. instruments for coating characterization, listed under “dielectric coatings”): 📏 metrology, calibration, testing
• specialized parts (e.g. OEM spectrometer chips) that can be integrated into instruments without selling the complete devices: 🧩 accessories & parts

Importantly, these offers are not hidden in obscure, service-only categories. They appear alongside hardware in the main product pages — so even someone looking only for equipment will discover relevant services, training, or accessories.

Categories like “spectroscopy” also continue to benefit from related articles in the RP Photonics Encyclopedia, which would not be feasible for narrowly defined service categories.

• More suppliers can benefit: For those offering services, software and other non-hardware things, but also accessories and parts (supplementary hardware), the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide, already very well established for hardware offers, now becomes far more useful.
• Existing suppliers benefit: Those offering not only hardware, but also related services like maintenance and repair, for example, can now clearly indicate that.
• Users benefit: Our users will surely appreciate that potentially interesting additional offers will be displayed — beginning with various offers of RP Photonics (e.g., training courses on photodetection, shown in the page with suppliers for photodetectors), soon followed by additional offers of our advertisers, and (probably more slowly) by other companies.

What about pricing? The good news: nothing changes!

• The Advertising Package keeps the same price structure: you pay per product category, regardless of how many offer types you select within it.
• You may decide to register in a few more categories, but the additional cost for that is small.
• Even with a free listing, you can add offer types. However, the reach is limited because free listings cannot include product descriptions. Our users strongly prefer seeing concise descriptions before clicking through to the supplier's website — which is why the Advertising Package is so much more effective.