Forty suppliers signed up, six live
Your sales team has had a good month recruiting suppliers. Forty businesses have agreed to list on the marketplace. Six are live. The rest are somewhere in onboarding: waiting for a company registration check, bank details that do not match the company name, an insurance certificate that expired last month, product certificates in a language nobody on the team reads, a signed seller agreement that went to the wrong director.
Your onboarding coordinator is managing all of this from a shared inbox and a spreadsheet with a column for each document. Suppliers who were keen at signing are going quiet.
Why onboarding drags
A B2B marketplace takes on more responsibility than a consumer one: trade buyers expect suppliers to be real, solvent, insured and compliant with the rules for their products. So you ask for more: company and VAT registration, beneficial owners, bank account verification for payouts, insurance, and category-specific certificates. What you require is your policy, set with your advisers; the problem is the process around it.
Documents arrive by email, in batches, some wrong, some partial, and each has to be opened, checked and logged. Suppliers do not know what is still missing, because the list lives in your spreadsheet.
| Onboarding item | Usual delay |
|---|---|
| Company and VAT registration | Name on application differs from registered name |
| Bank details for payouts | Account name does not match the company |
| Insurance certificate | Expired, or cover not what you require |
| Product certificates | Missing for some categories, unclear scope |
| Seller agreement | Signed by someone without authority, or not at all |
What slow onboarding costs
Every supplier waiting in onboarding is catalogue you do not have and sales you are not making, while buyers look elsewhere. Suppliers lose enthusiasm, and some withdraw. Your team spends its days opening attachments and writing chase emails rather than helping suppliers list good products.
Rushing it has its own cost: a supplier approved with the wrong bank details or an expired certificate creates problems later that are much harder to fix.
The onboarding flow we build
- Supplier checklist: each new supplier gets a secure onboarding page showing exactly what is required for their business type and categories, and what is still outstanding.
- Document reading: uploaded documents are read to extract names, numbers, dates and scope, and checked against the application, such as company name, registration number and expiry dates.
- Registry checks: UK company details are checked against Companies House, and VAT numbers against HMRC's VAT number check where applicable; other checks, such as sanctions or identity, use the provider you choose.
- Bank verification: payout bank details go through your payment provider's verification, such as Stripe Connect onboarding or a bank account name check service, before payouts are enabled.
- Automatic chasing: suppliers with outstanding items receive reminders listing exactly what is missing, and the sales contact who recruited them is told when a supplier stalls.
- Review queue: your team sees only items needing judgement, such as a mismatched name or an unusual certificate, with the document and the check result side by side, and approves each supplier to go live.
Which checks you run and what counts as a pass is your policy. The flow applies it consistently and keeps a record of every decision.
Onboarding week to week
Suppliers know what is missing without emailing to ask. The onboarding coordinator works a queue of decisions rather than a spreadsheet of attachments. Documents with expiry dates, like insurance, are recorded with those dates so they can be re-requested before they lapse. Sales can see where each new supplier is stuck.
Is supplier onboarding your bottleneck?
- Signed suppliers take a long time to go live.
- Onboarding progress is tracked in a spreadsheet.
- Suppliers keep asking what is still missing.
- Bank detail mismatches are found after payouts are set up.
- Certificates with expiry dates are not tracked after onboarding.