Who Uses Octopart?
Pulse
Octopart Staff
Oct 10, 2017

Earlier this year, we surveyed Octopart visitors for one month to learn more about their jobs, ages, purchasing decisions, and their preferred resources so we can provide a better user experience. When we closed the survey, over 1000 people had given us their feedback. We hope sharing some of our findings from the survey results gives some insight into how widely Octopart is used and what our audience looks like around the world.

Octopart is the industry’s most powerful search engine and spans a diverse group of people across a variety of industries and job functions. We first asked people taking the survey to indicate the industry they work in. For this question, respondents were allowed to choose multiple answers, which means that some work in more than one industry.

octopart user industries

Which of the following describes your industry?

We predicted consumer electronics to be the most popular response, but it was interesting to see that other industries such as industrial machinery, tools and equipment, instrumentation and controls, aerospace and defense, electronic component development, communications, and more were also popular choices.

When we asked people to identify their primary job function (no multiple responses allowed), these were the results:

octopart user job function

Which of the following describes your job function?

The three leading responses were design engineers (28.81%), purchasing professionals (18.44%), and R&D (16.52%), that together make up the majority of all responses. What is also interesting is how diverse the remaining ~36% are, including people in marketing and sales, corporate management, hobbyists, tech support, educators, architects, and more.

The survey respondents’ ages are relatively evenly distributed among three major cohorts: 21-30 (23%), 31-40 (26%), and 41-50 (23%). Combined, the cohorts make up a 21-50 age group of over 70% of total respondents — Octopart is used by people throughout their careers. Over 50% of the respondents work in companies with 50 or less employees. It is likely that they are employed by small businesses, or even startups.

As for geography, the majority of the survey respondents are located in North America (51%), but Octopart reaches engineers outside of the U.S. too. 32% of the people that took our survey are located in Europe and the remaining 17% are in South America, Asia, Australia, Africa, and the Middle East. We are constantly working on making Octopart accessible in more countries around the world.

So what does it all mean? One of the primary takeaways is the diversity among those who use Octopart. People of all ages that work around the world use Octopart at many points in their projects’ timelines. While people who use Octopart have a diversity of job functions and work in many industries, most of the people we surveyed are engineers or procurement professionals at smaller consumer electronics companies, and some have jobs that are potentially at the intersection of multiple industries. If you use Octopart for your work or hobby, or you are a distributor or manufacturer that lists with us, we welcome your feedback! Email us at contact@octopart.com — and tell your friends about us if you're a fan.

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