Vendor Marketplace OS | eCommerce Automation

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eCommerce

Marketplace Vendor Matching & Onboarding

Automated vendor discovery, vetting, and onboarding for B2B marketplaces and wholesale platforms.

eCommerce automation case study featuring lead management and workflow automation.

3 weeks → 3 days

Onboarding Time

+35%

Vendor Quality Score

10× faster

Application Processing

Overview

A B2B marketplace needed to scale vendor acquisition while maintaining quality. Manual vetting was slow and inconsistent, and onboarding took weeks. The automation reduced vendor onboarding from 3 weeks to 3 days.

Business Context

The marketplace's growth was constrained by their vendor acquisition capacity, creating a ceiling on catalog expansion and revenue growth. Buyers were requesting product categories that couldn't be filled due to the slow pace of vendor onboarding, while promising vendors were abandoning their applications during the lengthy manual vetting process — some waiting weeks without hearing back only to sign with competitor platforms. The operations team applied inconsistent standards when reviewing vendor applications, leading to quality issues with some approved vendors who damaged buyer trust while potentially rejecting good candidates based on reviewer variation and subjective judgments. The 3-week onboarding timeline was simply not competitive with faster-moving marketplace competitors who could activate vendors in days.

How We Built It

We designed an end-to-end vendor lifecycle management system starting with a self-service application portal that guides vendors through document submission and profile creation with clear progress indicators and requirements explanations. The document verification layer uses OpenAI to analyze uploaded business licenses, insurance certificates, tax documents, and compliance documentation, extracting key details like expiration dates, coverage amounts, and certification numbers and validating against requirements automatically. Vendors receive instant feedback on document issues rather than waiting days for manual review, with specific guidance on how to resolve problems and resubmit. An automated scoring engine evaluates applications across multiple dimensions — business history and years in operation, product quality indicators from samples or catalog review, fulfillment capabilities including warehouse locations and shipping methods, and financial stability signals — assigning tier classifications that determine commission rates, payment terms, and feature access levels. Scoring weights are configurable by product category, recognizing that different vendor types have different quality signals. Approved vendors flow into an onboarding checklist automation that guides them through catalog setup with bulk import tools, payment configuration with multiple payout options, shipping profile creation with carrier rate integration, and training completion for platform policies and best practices, with progress tracking and automated reminders for stalled steps that escalate to the vendor success team after defined periods. The vendor performance dashboard tracks ongoing metrics including fulfillment rates, on-time shipping percentage, customer reviews, return rates, and buyer inquiry response times, automatically adjusting tier status based on sustained performance with clear thresholds communicated to vendors. Integration layers connect approved vendors with the marketplace's payment processing and order management systems, enabling transactions to flow without manual intervention from the marketplace operations team, with automated invoice generation and scheduled payout disbursement.

Challenges

Manual vendor vetting taking weeks

Inconsistent quality standards

Document collection via email

No visibility into application pipeline

Onboarding steps scattered across tools

What We Delivered

Self-service vendor application portal

AI-powered document verification (licenses, insurance, certifications)

Automated scoring and tier assignment

Onboarding checklist automation

Vendor performance dashboard

Integration with payment and fulfillment systems

Tech Stack

Custom vendor portal, Make.com, OpenAI for document analysis, Retool, PostgreSQL

Results

3 weeks → 3 days

Onboarding Time

+35%

Vendor Quality Score

10× faster

Application Processing

Strategic Impact

The reduction from 3 weeks to 3 days in onboarding time has dramatically improved vendor acquisition conversion rates — the marketplace now activates 4x more vendors from the same number of applications, as promising vendors complete onboarding before losing interest or committing to competitor platforms. The 35% improvement in vendor quality scores reflects the consistency of automated vetting compared to variable manual review, with clear criteria applied uniformly across all applications regardless of reviewer workload or subjective impressions. The 10× faster application processing has enabled the marketplace to expand vendor outreach efforts significantly without worrying about creating a processing backlog that would lead to poor vendor experience. Consistent vendor quality has improved buyer satisfaction metrics and reduced the operational burden of managing poor-performing vendors who previously slipped through inconsistent manual vetting, lowering return rates and buyer complaints. The tier-based system creates natural incentives for vendor performance improvement, with clear pathways to better commission rates and feature access for vendors who maintain strong metrics, driving continuous quality improvement across the vendor base. The self-service approach has reduced the vendor success team's administrative burden by over 60%, allowing them to focus on high-touch relationship building with strategic vendors and underperforming vendors who need coaching rather than routine onboarding tasks. The automated performance monitoring has enabled proactive intervention with underperforming vendors before issues escalate to buyer complaints, with automated warning notifications and improvement plan workflows. The infrastructure positions the marketplace to scale vendor acquisition significantly, supporting expansion into new product categories and geographic markets without proportionally scaling the vendor operations team, with the vendor portal easily adaptable for different category requirements and localization needs. The detailed vendor analytics have also informed marketplace strategy, revealing which vendor profiles and product categories drive the highest buyer engagement and retention.