A buyer with a line down is not running a procurement process. They are looking for the first credible answer, and the second-best price that arrives in forty minutes beats the best price that arrives tomorrow afternoon. This is the whole of the advantage available to a small supplier against a large one, and it costs nothing but a routine.
What the numbers do for you
Your storefront shows two figures that come from the platform, not from you: your response rate — the share of requests you answer at all — and your median response time. Buyers see both before they read your offers, and matching prefers suppliers who answer.
Neither figure rewards being fast once. They reward being consistent, which is a scheduling problem rather than a sales problem.
The routine
Three checks a day, at fixed times. Morning, after lunch, end of day. A request that arrives at 09:10 and is answered at 09:30 is in a different category from one answered at 16:00, and the difference is a calendar entry, not effort.
Answer within the hour during business hours. If you cannot quote in an hour, send the holding reply below. It counts as a response, it stops the buyer going elsewhere, and it is honest.
Decline fast, and say why. "We do not carry this family" takes fifteen seconds and improves your response rate. A declined request is not a lost sale; an ignored request is a lost buyer.
Quote the whole list or say which lines you can cover. Buyers comparing a ten-line request want to know your four lines are real, not that you are silent on six.
The three replies you need
Write these once and keep them where you can paste them.
The quote. Price per line, lead time in working days, condition, warranty months, Incoterm with the named place, and what the clock starts on. Six facts; anything else is decoration.
The holding reply. "We have three of these in stock and can ship from Rotterdam. I am confirming the exact revision this afternoon and will send a firm price by 16:00." Specific, time-bound, and it buys you the afternoon.
The decline. "We do not carry Festo pneumatics — only electrical automation. Worth asking [nobody in particular]; happy to quote if you have Siemens or ABB lines." Fifteen seconds, and the buyer remembers you next time.
What to fix first if your median is bad
In rough order of impact per hour of effort:
- Notifications reaching a person, not a shared inbox nobody owns. Half of all slow responses are a routing problem.
- A named owner per working day. Not "the team".
- Prices published on your listings. Every line with a visible price is a request you do not have to answer at all — the buyer self-serves and either adds it to a basket or does not.
- A weekly stock upload. Stale stock produces requests for things you no longer have, which you then answer slowly because you have to check.
- Templates. See above.
Holidays and capacity
Turning on vacation mode when you cannot answer is better for your numbers than silence, and much better for the buyer. It pauses matching, shows a notice on your storefront, and your response rate is not damaged by requests you were never going to see. Turn it off when you are back; the requests resume the same day.
The same applies to capacity. A supplier who is genuinely too busy for small orders is better off saying so in their storefront terms — a minimum order value is a legitimate thing to publish — than declining twenty requests a month.
What good looks like
The suppliers who win the most business on this marketplace are, almost without exception, the ones who: publish prices on most lines, refresh stock weekly, answer within the business day, and decline clearly when they cannot help. None of that requires more staff. It requires the requests to land somewhere a person looks at three fixed times a day, and three pieces of text written once.