Panel operations
Catalogue gating
Last updated by The PanelCompare editorial team
Why does catalogue gating matter to a buyer?
Gating is common enough to shape how price data can be collected at all. Two indexed panels state plainly on their public services pages that the catalogue opens only with an account (verified on bulkfollows.com and smmpanelus.com, PanelCompare domain research, 2026-09-06). Scraping public pages therefore reaches only a minority of the market, and the scalable route is registering an account per panel and reading the catalogue through the services API action instead.
As a signal it cuts both ways honestly. A panel hiding rates is not necessarily dishonest — gating suppresses competitor scraping and reduces support load from tyre-kickers — but it is choosing not to be compared, and a panel with a published complete service list is choosing the opposite. Between two otherwise equal panels, the one whose prices can be checked before signup is the safer first purchase.
How does catalogue gating show up in a price list?
The public page carries category names, marketing claims and sometimes a handful of headline rates, with the full table appearing after login. Those headline rates are frequently the loss-leader rows rather than representative ones.
Gating also hides per-account pricing. Because panels can set custom rates per user, a catalogue read through one account is that account’s catalogue, which is why a price index has to say how its accounts were created.
Think this definition is wrong?
Terminology in this market is set by the panels that use it, and it moves. If a panel uses catalogue gating to mean something other than what is written here, send us the listing and we will either correct the definition or record the variant. The process is on the about page.