Background
Sourcing batteries on the secondary market comes with a familiar set of challenges — not knowing where to find available supply, and not being able to compare it once you do. For a primer on buying safely end to end, see how to buy lithium-ion batteries on the secondary market. This piece focuses on the very first move: telling someone exactly what you’re after.
Simplifying the Process of Sourcing Available Supply
When building on second-life batteries, it can take time to first find the right battery and then the right supply of that battery. You can browse what’s currently for sale on the available-stock catalog, but the deeper challenge is timing: supply is intermittent, and the batch you need may not be listed the day you go looking. That gap between supply and demand makes procurement hard to plan — and it’s exactly why a brief sent to the desk beats refreshing a page.
Rather than make you monitor availability constantly, Cling works the other way around: you tell the desk what you need — whether detailed or general — and we match it against current and incoming supply, then flag relevant stock as it lands. (For more on why supply shows up so unpredictably, see the intermittent supply challenge.)
Tell the desk what you need
The single most useful thing you can do is describe your requirement clearly. You can be as precise or as broad as you like — both work, because a person reads it:
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Data-driven detail: form factor (cells, modules, packs), chemistry (LFP, NMC), capacity, voltage, configuration, and acceptable state-of-health.
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Free-form text: describe the need in your own words, unrestricted by technical parameters, and let the desk translate it into a search.
Early on, we learned that long mandatory forms simply got in the way. David Hjelmström, Sales Manager at Cling, put it plainly: "Too many mandatory fields made the process lengthy. Many customers found it challenging to complete all the required information, so we often ended up handling the requests ourselves." The lesson stuck — today a human handles the brief, which means broad and specific enquiries are equally welcome.
This combination doesn’t just help us find better matches; it deepens our understanding of how buyers articulate their needs, so we can come back with more relevant supply. As Rasmus Lindqvist, Head of Data, notes: "The point is flexibility in how you ask, paired with a real read on matching supply — so it’s easier to find what you need quickly."
Conclusion
To make battery circularity a reality, sourcing has to be easy to start. By having you simply tell the desk what you’re after — and doing the matching, qualifying and deal-running on your behalf — Cling keeps that first step low-friction. In a fast-changing market, there is always more work to be done.
Cling is committed to continuous improvement. This effort is collaborative, and we need the entire battery industry to join us. We welcome ongoing feedback to refine our approach.
What’s the biggest friction point for you when sourcing batteries? It’s the kind of thing we’d love to hear when you reach out.
For more information, contact sales@clingsystems.com