How routing works
When a customer posts a job, we have to pick a trader to offer it to. Tradelynx is free for traders, so we can't use price as a sorting mechanism. Instead, we use four interlocking mechanics that aim at one outcome: the trader who has been waiting longest, in the right area, who's a good fit for the job, gets the offer first.
What we already do
Before any of the four fairness mechanics fire, every lead passes through structural filters that are non-negotiable:
- Verification. Only verified traders are eligible. We check identity, qualifications, and public liability insurance.
- Capacity caps.If a trader is already at their self-set daily or active-job limit, they're skipped — even if they'd be the natural next pick.
- Service area.A trader has to cover the lead's postcode area. We band postcodes into primary, expansion, and outside-area — primary always wins over expansion, expansion always wins over none.
- Queue mode.A trader who's flagged themselves as unavailable (call queue mode = away, on holiday, etc.) is skipped.
- Round-robin.Among eligible traders, we rotate the queue position so the same trader doesn't hoover up every lead.
The four fairness mechanics
Under free pricing, perceived unfairness is the single biggest retention risk. We added four mechanics so that fair distribution isn't just a claim — it's built into the engine, in code, and auditable per-decision.
1. Value-aware round-robin
The classic round-robin equalises on lead count. That's fine when every lead is similar, but our leads vary in value — insurance jobs are worth more to a trader than a quick reactive callout. So we also equalise on the valuewe've offered you in the last 30 days, scoped to your trade. If you and another plumber are tied on the round-robin, the one we've offered less plumber-value to recently sorts ahead.
What "value" means here:we use the Tradelynx-fee proxy for each lead — the price we would charge the trader for the lead under the paid model. It's not the same as the homeowner's job value (we don't have a reliable estimate of that), but it's a defensible signal of how rich each lead is. When the homeowner-job-value data improves, we'll switch.
2. Newcomer ramp
A newly-verified trader with no Tradelynx track record sits behind every established trader on review count, response time, and reliability score. That's a chicken-and-egg problem.
For your first 30 days as a verified trader, you get a priority boost on a share of eligible leads. The share starts at 30% on day 1 and tapers linearly to 0%by day 30. When the boost fires on a lead, you float to the front of your round-robin band. The boost is deterministic (we hash the lead id) — so a missed lead isn't bad luck, it's the same as if every newcomer rolled the same fair dice.
The boost only affects ordering — it never bypasses verification, capacity, service area, or any other filter.
3. Transparency
Every routing decision is auditable to the traders who were in the eligible set for it:
- Per-lead view at
/t/lead-history/[leadId]: your position in the queue, the lead's outcome, how long it took to be accepted, and the display name of the trader who won (no contact details — we never share other traders' PII). - Weekly stats at /t/fairness: leads offered, leads accepted, value offered, value won, average queue position — compared against the median trader in your trade. Only the median; we never compare against individual traders.
- This page, so traders and prospective traders can see exactly what the engine does before they sign up.
4. Capacity mode
Different traders run different shops. A sole-trader plumber doing two boilers a week wants different leads to a small firm running a three-van crew. So you can opt into one of three modes:
- Small jobs — prefer leads up to £500. Bigger leads are still offered to you if no large-mode trader is available; you just sort later on those.
- All jobs (default) — no preference. Existing traders stay on this until they explicitly opt in.
- Large jobs — prefer leads of £2,000 or more. Same principle in reverse.
Capacity mode is opt-in, not enforced. You stay eligible for every lead in your area; the mode only nudges priority. There's a 7-day cooldown between changes so the mechanic can't be gamed per-lead.
What never happens
- No paid priority.You can't buy your way to the front of the queue. There's no "featured trader" tier and no advertising slot.
- No reputation-tied routing for newcomers.We don't use review count to gate routing in your first 30 days — that's the whole point of the newcomer ramp.
- No PII leakage between traders.Lead history shows the winning trader's display name only. No phone, no email, no profile photo, no other trader's position.
- No silent overrides. Every routing decision is written to an audit row with the full mechanics state. Traders see their own slice; we see the whole thing for support / dispute resolution.
Have I been treated fairly?
If you're a trader and a routing decision feels wrong, three places to look:
- Your fairness summary shows your stats versus the median for your trade.
- The per-lead history page (link from the lead detail) shows the decision for that specific lead.
- Email support@tradelynx.co.uk and we'll pull the audit row. We never claim the engine is perfect — if it's misbehaving for you, we want to know.