How to Automate E-commerce Vendor/Supplier Onboarding

5 min readMay 30, 2023

Whether you are a B2B or a B2C e-commerce business, the relationship with your vendor or supplier is crucial. A supplier is the first link in your supply chain and usually exists in a B2B sense. A vendor, on the hand, is the person who sells the products to the end customer. While you could be a supplier or a vendor yourself, you still rely on a vendor or a supplier respectively to get your goods moving.

Quite naturally, there is a lot of information exchange between the two entities. Sometimes you may need to switch vendors or bring in a new supplier. That’s a lot of paperwork. It’s tedious. It’s slow. And it’s monotonous. As several players and moving parts come into consideration, this process often gets characterized by frustrations and delays. To eliminate such situations, increasingly, companies are realizing that a strong onboarding process is vital to nimbly respond to changes in the supply chain. This is where e-commerce automation in supplier and vendor onboarding comes in.

E-commerce automation is a huge shift. Therefore, like with any facet of e-commerce automation, the vendor/supplier onboarding too, needs to have clarity first. Because unless you know what exactly you need from the switch-up, you are going to be in deep waters as soon as you plug in. So let’s start from the basics.

WHERE DOES VENDOR/SELLER ONBOARDING FIT INTO THE SELLER ENABLEMENT FUNNEL?

Imagine you have an e-commerce marketplace. There are a range of suppliers or sellers who sell on your platform. Seller enablement is all about empowering these suppliers to set up shop efficiently and sell more effectively on your platform.

How? By having them go through the following steps:

AWARENESS: Sellers learn about the platform and its benefits through promotional materials, ads, or referrals.
CONSIDERATION: Sellers evaluate the platform’s suitability, comparing features, fees, and policies.
ONBOARDING: Sellers join the platform, complete necessary documentation, and set up their seller accounts, product pages, etc.
OPTIMIZATION: Sellers optimize their listings, marketing strategies, and pricing to maximize visibility and attract customers.
GROWTH & EXPANSION: Sellers focus on growing their businesses by utilizing analytics, exploring new markets, and reaching a larger customer base.

This constitutes the seller enablement funnel. As you can see, onboarding sits right in the middle. And it also happens to be the most time-consuming step because it involves:

Gathering information
Verifying credentials
Setting up payment terms
Negotiating contracts
Connecting the supplier’s systems to the retailer’s (your) platform for streamlined operations and transactions
Running tests to ensure that the orders are going through
Providing the right tools and resources to manage products, orders, customers, etc.

This process involves multiple stakeholders such as the merchandising department, finance department, and legal department. Since there is a lot of data entry involved, manually handling this process makes it prone to errors and takes a lot of time.

PREPARING FOR SUPPLIER/VENDOR ONBOARDING AUTOMATION

As I’ve already mentioned before, e-commerce automation is a huge change to your traditional vendor/supplier onboarding process. So before jumping into it, you need to align a few things, make a few refinements, and most importantly, have a clear direction to prepare for it. Here’s how:

1. ANALYZE THE CURRENT PROCESS

Begin by understanding your current onboarding process. Identify areas of inefficiency or heavy manual intervention that could benefit from automation.

2. DEFINE GOALS FOR E-COMMERCE AUTOMATION

Based on your analysis, define what you want to achieve through e-commerce automation. This could be faster onboarding, less manual data entry, improved compliance checks, etc.

3. ALIGN STAKEHOLDERS

Since there are multiple teams involved in the onboarding process, there are a lot of expectations that need to be matched with e-commerce automation. Meet with your merchandising, finance, marketing, legal, and other teams involved in the process to ensure there is clarity on their requirements and how e-commerce automation will meet those, how automation will affect their day-to-day work, and what changes to expect in the onboarding process.

4. MAP THE ONBOARDING PROCESS

Start by identifying each step in your current onboarding workflow, from initial contact to full integration. Then document these steps in a visual format (like a flowchart) to provide a clear overview of the process, highlighting key interactions, decision points, and areas for potential improvement.

HOW TO MAP OUT THE ONBOARDING PROCESS FOR EFFICIENT E-COMMERCE AUTOMATION

The goal of onboarding automation is to reduce the time between the initial contact of the supplier/vendor with the e-commerce marketplace and the first sale. Success depends on two factors:

The e-commerce marketplace’s seller enablement prowess
Supplier’s/vendor’s technical capabilities

Let’s say you are a retailer selling goods on your online marketplace. And you are onboarding a seller (supplier). Here’s what you need to do:

Your merchandising team needs to get in touch with the supplier’s primary contact in the partnership. This contact is probably going to be the person getting on calls to understand your process, uploading the documents, etc.

Your team needs to have a list of all the documents that the seller needs to fill, sign, and submit. These include NDAs, agreements, terms, insurance forms, etc. Typically, you should be sending this checklist to the seller before onboarding.

Along with the document checklist, your team should also provide the seller with a list of technical requirements (depending on your marketplace features) that needs to be matched by the seller’s systems to be able to seamlessly connect the two. Based on this list and how compatible the seller’s system is with your marketplace, the seller might need to source software, file format converters, etc. to plug into your system. At this stage, it is ideal to set up calls with the seller’s primary contact, conduct demos, and provide the necessary documentation to make this as smooth as possible.

While these technical details are being straightened out, your marketing team can jump in to prepare co-marketing materials for the launch, plan marketing campaigns, etc.