Enriching Clay tables with vendor-stack data

Clay is very good at the part most enrichment stacks are bad at: letting you bolt an arbitrary HTTP API onto a table of domains and treat the response like any other column. That means you don't need a native VendorStacks integration to use VendorStacks in Clay — you need one HTTP request column, a handful of field mappings, and a formula column to turn the result into something a rep can act on.

This walkthrough assumes a table where each row already has a company domain. If your rows have company names instead, resolve to a domain first with whichever Clay enrichment you already use; every call below is keyed on the domain.

Step 1 — the HTTP request column

Add an HTTP request (API call) enrichment column to the table. The configuration is the same three fields any HTTP step asks for:

• Method — GET
• URL — https://api.vendorstacks.com/v1/check?url={{domain}} where {{domain}} is the variable reference to your domain column. Clay interpolates column values into the URL, so the request is per-row without any extra glue.
• Headers — Authorization: Bearer vr_live_…. Nothing else is required; there's no content type to set on a GET.

Before you wire it up, run the call once from your terminal so you know exactly what shape you're mapping:

curl "https://api.vendorstacks.com/v1/check?url=notify-hq.com" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VENDORSTACKS_KEY"

{
  "domain": "notify-hq.com",
  "found": true,
  "vendor_stack": {
    "sms_messaging": ["twilio"],
    "payments": ["stripe"],
    "cloud_infra": ["aws"],
    "email": ["sendgrid"]
  },
  "subprocessor_urls": ["https://notify-hq.com/legal/subprocessors"],
  "vendor_confidence": "high",
  "scanned_at": "2026-07-02T11:04:19Z",
  "credits_used": 1,
  "credit_balance": 1074
}

Step 2 — map the response into columns

Clay lets you pull specific paths out of a JSON response into their own columns. Do that rather than leaving one giant JSON blob in the table — downstream formula columns, filters, and exports all get easier when the fields are real columns. The mapping worth building:

• $.found → Stack found (boolean). Your gate for everything downstream.
• $.vendor_stack.sms_messaging → SMS vendors (list). Repeat for whichever of the 24 categories matter to you: email, payments, cloud_infra, analytics_data, crm_sales, support_cx, auth_identity, observability, productivity, ai_ml, privacy_compliance, hr_payroll.
• $.subprocessor_urls[0] → Evidence URL. This is the page on the company's own site where the vendors are named. It belongs in the CRM record and, later, in the email a rep sends.
• $.vendor_confidence → Confidence. Use it to decide whether a claim is strong enough to cite by name.
• $.scanned_at → Scanned at. Freshness matters when you re-run the table in a quarter and want to diff.

If you want the full evidence quote rather than just the source URL, the response also carries per-category *_evidence fields containing the verbatim source rows. That's the text a rep can paste into an email, and it's the reason a vendor claim survives a skeptical reply.

Step 3 — handle the rows that miss

Some rows will come back with found: false. Read that precisely: it means no public evidence was located for this domain, not that the company runs no vendors. Two rules follow.

First, never score a miss as a negative. A row with found: false should land in an "unknown" bucket that a human can decide about, not in the disqualified pile alongside companies you actually know are a bad fit.

Second, misses are free. Pricing is 1 credit per lookup, and you're billed only for successful results — a lookup that returns no vendor data, or a scan that fails outright, costs zero credits. That changes how aggressively you can run a table: enriching 2,000 rows where 30% miss costs about 1,400 credits, not 2,000.

Step 4 — the scoring formula column

The point of the columns above is a single sortable number. A formula column that reads the mapped fields works fine; the logic that tends to hold up:

competitor in sms_messaging      → +35   // proven category budget
complementary vendor present     → +10 each
total vendor count >= 8          → +10   // technically mature
found == false                   →  hold // unknown, do not disqualify

Weight the competitor signal highest. A company already paying for your category has budget, a renewal date, and a documented pain surface; a same-size company with no category spend has none of those. The longer version of that argument, plus eleven other plays you can build off the same columns, is in 12 things GTM teams can do with a vendor-stack API.

Two Clay-specific gotchas

Timeouts on unindexed domains. Domains already in the index answer in under a second. A domain we haven't seen triggers a live scan of the company's public web presence, which takes 15–90 seconds. If your HTTP column has a configurable timeout, give it room — 120 seconds is the safe number. If it doesn't, and you need guaranteed-instant responses, point the column at /v1/company/{{domain}} instead: same data, same price, but it never scans. It returns what's in the index or nothing.

Rate limits on big runs. The default limit is 60 requests per minute. Clay will happily fire faster than that on a large table, and you'll see 429 rate_limitedresponses. If your HTTP step supports a retry or delay setting, use it; otherwise run large tables in chunks rather than all at once.

What the finished table gives you

Each row now carries: the vendor stack by category, the URL of the company's own page that names those vendors, a confidence tier, a scan timestamp, and a computed fit score. That's enough to filter the table down to a working list, export it to a sequencer, and give each rep an opening line that cites the prospect's own published page rather than a guess.

It's also cheap enough to re-run. Pointing the same table at /v1/company monthly and diffing vendor_stack against last month's snapshot turns the table into a trigger feed: accounts that just added a category you sell into, or dropped the competitor you displace.

The API reference has the full response shape and every query parameter, and the pricing page has the credit packs. Get a key — 25 free credits, no card, instant — and you can have the column working before your coffee gets cold.