Local merchant and supplier onboarding

We write the onboarding standard for the group's local merchants and suppliers and run the intake for a platform, a marketplace or a new market. The standard sets who joins, the commercial terms, the data each merchant supplies, the checks before activation and the first-month support that gets each partner selling.

Onboarding becomes a process the group owns, with a record of each decision.

• An onboarding standard: eligibility criteria, tiers and the terms offered to each tier.
• A merchant data template with required fields, image rules and unit-of-sale definitions.
• A due-diligence checklist covering capacity, delivery ability and payment details, run before activation.
• An onboarding pipeline that tracks every prospect from approach to first sale.
• Standard commercial terms and a merchant welcome pack in clear language.
• A merchant health report on listing quality, order performance and payout status.

• New merchants reach a live product quickly, and the board reads the days from first approach to that first product.
• Signed merchants list what they sell, and you read the share with active listings after 30 days.
• Products go live with complete data the first time, and you read the share that arrive complete at first submission.
• Merchants fulfil what they sell, and the board reads merchant order fulfilment rate across their opening weeks.
• Merchants are paid against recorded terms, and the board reads the share of payouts that match those terms at first payment.

Merchants are signed on handshake terms and supply data in whatever format they have. Some never list, some list products that cannot be fulfilled, and a few are paid on terms nobody recorded. The platform has a supply side that cannot be relied on.

• Merchants have joined with different terms agreed verbally by different people.
• Some signed partners have not listed a single product.
• Product data arrives as photographs, messages and spreadsheets in several formats.
• No one checks a supplier's capacity before its products go live.
• Payments to merchants are raised from memory, not from a record of terms.

Marketplace operators, retail groups sourcing local range in a new Gulf market, and distributors adding local suppliers who need a consistent standard across dozens or hundreds of counterparties.

Qasim Abbas has answered for treasury above USD 50M at group level, so he writes onboarding terms with the payables in mind. Every term agreed with a merchant becomes a payment the group must make.

We run onboarding through the group's marketplace or catalogue system, including Jungleworks Yelo under the group's own contract, and through its ledger for supplier records and payables. See how fees work.

How many merchants should we sign before launch?

Enough to cover the categories a customer needs at launch. We size the first cohort to those categories, then add merchants as the data shows where range is thin.

Can small local merchants meet a data standard?

Yes. The data template is simple, and the welcome pack and first-month support carry each merchant to its first listing.

How do the merchant terms fix responsibility for supply?

We set the commercial position in the merchant terms and hand it to your counsel ready to paper, so the liability sits with the party that failed.

Bring your current merchant list to a private briefing. We sort it against a written standard and show how many names can go live within a month.