The magnetosphere electronic surplus alliance is one search across the small electronic surplus shops: 52 of them, in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands and Poland, and 145,275 listings. Each has stock nobody else has — tubes, new old stock, test equipment, the last few of something — and no way to be found but one site at a time. The part search engines index the big distributors; this indexes the shops.

Nothing is sold here. Every result links to the listing on the shop's own site, and that is where you buy it. No shop pays to be listed or to come first.

who runs it

magnetosphere electronic surplus (magnetosphere.net), one of the shops listed. Most of its own stock came from BG Micro, and this is meant in that spirit: the shops are better found together than one at a time.

how it works

Once a day a crawler reads each shop's catalog — through the product feed its own store software already serves, where there is one — and the search runs over what it found. Every listing says when it was read, and its price and stock are as the shop listed them then, in the shop's currency.

Listings are sorted into one shared set of categories, since each shop has its own or none, and a listing with a maker's part number gets a page with every listing of that part, from every shop, and links to look it up at the big distributors.

The crawler sends one request at a time to a shop, waits between them, obeys robots.txt, and calls itself surplus in its user agent. To keep it out, add User-agent: surplus / Disallow: / to your robots.txt.

Photos are not crawled. A listing's photo is fetched from its shop the first time someone looks at that listing here, and kept, so the shop sends it once.

privacy

No accounts, no ads, no analytics or tracking scripts. The palette you choose is kept in your own browser.

list your shop

A shop on Shopify, WooCommerce or m2 can be listed as it is. Anything else can publish a surplus feed — one JSON file, at any address — and be read from that instead of being crawled page by page. Only id, title and url are required for each product; prices are decimal strings. To be added, or left out, get in touch through magnetosphere.net.

{
  "version": 1,
  "shop": {
    "id": "yourshop",
    "name": "Your Surplus",
    "url": "https://example.com",
    "location": "Anytown, USA"
  },
  "updated": "2026-10-04T12:00:00Z",
  "products": [
    {
      "id": "1N4001",
      "title": "1N4001 rectifier diode, 50V 1A",
      "url": "https://example.com/p/1N4001",
      "price": "0.10",
      "currency": "USD",
      "sku": "1N4001",
      "condition": "new old stock",
      "in_stock": true,
      "quantity": 500,
      "image": "https://example.com/i/1n4001.jpg"
    }
  ]
}

credits

Country flags: the Twemoji Country Flags font (github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill), its art from Twemoji, under CC BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). State flags: Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Listings and photos belong to their shops.