Merchant onboarding management

We run onboarding for the merchants, sellers and suppliers joining the group's platform or network. One lead owns the pipeline: documents, commercial terms, catalogues, systems connections and the first orders. Every merchant carries a status, an owner and a go-live date.

• An onboarding pipeline tracker with status, owner and target date for every merchant.
• A standard merchant file: documents, signed terms, bank details and contacts.
• A terms matrix recording commission, fees and payment terms for each merchant and any exception.
• A catalogue and systems readiness checklist with a pass or fail gate before go-live.
• A monthly onboarding report: merchants added, time to first order and cost per merchant.

• Merchants go live on a known date.
• A readiness gate checks each catalogue and system link before launch, and the board reads the share that pass first time.
• Onboarding cost per merchant is calculated for every intake and reported monthly.
• Commercial terms sit in one matrix, and the share of merchants on standard terms shows how many exceptions the group has granted.
• The commercial team and operations read the same count of merchants in progress, by status.

Each merchant is onboarded differently. Documents arrive piecemeal, terms are agreed verbally, catalogues go live with errors, and the commercial team cannot say how many merchants are in progress, what each cost to bring on or when revenue should start.

• Merchants wait weeks for go-live and nobody can say why.
• Commercial terms differ between merchants without a stated reason.
• Catalogue errors are corrected after launch, on live orders.
• The commercial team and operations disagree on how many merchants are in progress.
• Cost of onboarding a merchant has never been calculated.

Marketplace operators, delivery platforms, distributors and retail groups that add merchants or suppliers regularly, and whose onboarding is a string of emails handled by whoever is available.

Qasim Abbas has spent more than 16 years inside Gulf family-based and venture-backed groups, and puts a cost on a process before it scales. Onboarding at volume is such a process, and we give it a cost per merchant from the first intake.

We work with the platform, catalogue and payment tools you already use. See how fees work.

Can you onboard merchants in several countries?

Yes. The pipeline shows each market, and we run them all on one timetable.

What if our merchants are small and informal?

The standard file is sized to the merchant. A simple checklist for small sellers keeps the same gate before go-live without a heavy burden.

Describe how many merchants you add each month and where they stall. We return the pipeline tracker those merchants would sit in, with a status, an owner and a go-live date against each.