Can you send us our numbers for the quarter?
A supplier's sales director emails their account manager: they have a board meeting next week and need sales through the marketplace by product and month, the number of buyers, and how they are trending. The account manager asks your data person, who runs a query, pastes it into a spreadsheet, and sends it three days later. Next month another supplier asks for something similar, but by region. Then another wants to know what buyers searched for that they do not stock.
Your data person has become a report service for suppliers.
Why suppliers need data from you
On a marketplace, the supplier does not own the buyer relationship in the same way as a direct sale. They see orders, but not the bigger picture: how their products perform in search, how many buyers viewed but did not buy, which categories are growing, what buyers look for. The marketplace has all of this.
Suppliers who can see their performance invest more: better listings, better prices, more stock. Suppliers who cannot tend to treat the marketplace as a side channel.
| Report suppliers ask for | Data source |
|---|---|
| Sales by product and period | Orders |
| Buyer counts and repeat rate | Orders, buyer accounts |
| Search appearances and clicks | Search logs |
| Searches with no good match | Search logs, zero results |
| Performance against standards | Scorecard data |
What ad hoc reporting costs
Staff time producing one-off reports, which grows with the number of suppliers. Inconsistency, when different people produce slightly different numbers for the same supplier. Supplier frustration at waiting. And a missed chance: suppliers who understood what buyers want would improve their listings and range without being asked.
There is also a data sharing question. Which buyer information suppliers can see is governed by your terms and data protection obligations, which your advisers should confirm. One-off reports make it easy to share too much by accident.
The supplier reporting we build
- Reporting data: orders, listings, search logs and scorecard data are brought into a reporting store, refreshed on a schedule.
- Sharing rules: your team defines what suppliers can see, such as buyer counts and sectors but not buyer identities, or anonymised category benchmarks, and the rules are enforced in every report.
- Supplier dashboard: each supplier sees sales, buyers, search performance and trends for their own products in their dashboard, with filters by product, category and period.
- Opportunity insights: suppliers see searches in their categories that returned few or no results, and products where they rank poorly, as prompts to improve listings or range.
- Scheduled exports: suppliers can schedule a monthly export in the format their own team uses, for their board or their ERP.
- Account manager view: your account managers see the same dashboard for any supplier, to prepare for reviews.
Suppliers who can see how they are doing
Suppliers get their numbers when they need them, without asking. Account managers go into reviews with the same data the supplier sees. Your data person goes back to working on the marketplace. And suppliers start acting on what buyers search for, which improves the catalogue for everyone.
Because every supplier sees numbers produced the same way, arguments about whose figures are right become rare, and when a supplier does query a number, it can be traced back to the orders behind it.
Are supplier report requests piling up?
- Suppliers email regularly asking for sales or buyer data.
- Reports are produced by hand, one supplier at a time.
- Different staff produce different numbers for the same supplier.
- Suppliers cannot see search or view data for their products.
- Rules on what buyer data suppliers can see are unclear.