Demand FAQ: answering supplier questions in one place
Once a demand goes live, different suppliers tend to ask the same things: "Is a certificate required?", "Is delivery at the port or at the plant?", "What are the payment terms?" Instead of writing back to every supplier separately, you collect these as a single answer on the FAQ tab of your demand, which leaves you with one consistent list of answers to give everyone.
Where the tab is
Open your demand from the My Demands list. The tabs across the top of the demand run, from left to right: Offers, Details, Messages, FAQ and Activity. When you switch to the FAQ tab you see the Visible to suppliers badge at the top and the Add Q&A button on the right. The badge reminds you that nothing you write here is a private note — suppliers can read it.
Adding a question and answer
- Press the Add Q&A button.
- Type the question as a single line in the Question field (this field is plain text; no formatting is applied).
- Write your reply in the Answer field. This field is a formatting-enabled writing area: Write and Preview tabs sit above it, and a line-numbered writing surface below.
- Finish with Save. To back out, use Cancel.
If either the question or the answer field is empty, the Save button stays disabled; you have to fill in both. The question can be up to 500 characters and the answer up to 5,000.
Which formatting works in the answer
The toolbar of the answer field has Bold, Italic, Heading, Bullet list, Numbered list, Quote, Code and Link buttons. Just select some text and press the button.
When nothing is selected, the buttons behave as follows: Bold, Italic and Code insert a sample text and leave it selected, so you can type over it. Heading, Bullet list, Numbered list and Quote apply to the line the cursor is on; if that line is empty, a sample line is inserted. Link creates a link skeleton and leaves the cursor in the address part, so you can start typing the address straight away.
If you prefer to type the markup yourself, the following notation works:
**bold**and*italic*`code`(handy when writing units, codes or measurements)- lines starting with
-or*become a bullet list; lines starting with1.become a numbered list - lines starting with
>become a quote #,##,###for headings- links in the form
[link text](https://...) - blocks separated by a blank line become separate paragraphs
Before saving, you can check the formatted result on the Preview tab. For security reasons, only web (http, https) and email (mailto) addresses turn into clickable links; if you enter any other kind of address, no link is created and only the text you typed is shown.
Editing and deleting
Edit and Delete buttons sit under every saved question and answer. Edit opens the same writing area; you complete the change with Save or discard it with Cancel. When you press the Delete button, a Delete this FAQ? prompt and a Yes, delete button appear inside the row — two steps, to prevent accidental deletion.
If the list fails to load, instead of an empty tab you see an error notice and a Retry button; once the connection issue has passed, one click reloads it.
Who writes, who reads
Write access belongs to the buyer who opened the demand, and to them alone. Adding, editing and deleting questions and answers can only be done by the company that owns the demand; a supplier can neither add a new entry nor change or delete an existing one.
What you write here is not a private note. The content is stored so that it is open to every supplier who can view the demand — those who have already submitted an offer and those who have not can both reach the same list, and no entry can be kept private to a single company. The Visible to suppliers badge is a reminder of exactly that.
On the other hand, this list is not currently shown as a separate section on the supplier's own demand screen. So if you need a particular answer to definitely reach a particular supplier, also send the text you wrote in the FAQ to that company's thread on the Messages tab.
Anything you only want to tell one specific company (company-specific price flexibility, an exception discussed with a single supplier) should go straight to the Messages tab rather than the FAQ in the first place.
Why it is worth the effort
Writing the same answer five times to five different suppliers wastes time and creates discrepancies between the replies; saying "EXW" to one company while writing "FOB" to another makes the offers impossible to compare. Keeping one correct answer in the FAQ means that whichever supplier you reply to, you give the same information; no contradictions are left between your answers, offers come in on the same assumptions, and your comparison table stays clean.
A practical approach: leave the FAQ empty when you publish the demand, watch the questions that come in through the first messages, and move every recurring question there. After a few demands you will have a ready-made set of questions and answers that you can add to new demands from the outset.