You have opened a demand, read through it, but you cannot submit an offer. There is no single reason for this; four different situations lead to the same outcome. By working through the order below, you can tell in a few seconds which one you are facing.
Symptom
When you open a demand from the Marketplace, the action card on the right normally carries a Make an offer button. You are running into one of these three situations:
- The button is nowhere to be seen, and a short explanatory note sits in its place.
- An information screen opens instead of the demand detail.
- You prepare and submit your offer, and it comes back with a warning.
If the button reads View your offer instead, nothing is wrong: you have already submitted an offer on this demand, and the button takes you to it. Continue is no cause for concern either: you have started preparing your offer but have not submitted it yet, and the button picks up where you left off.
Possible cause 1 — The demand belongs to your own company
You cannot submit an offer on a demand opened by your own company. In this case the following note appears in place of the Make an offer button:
This is your own demand — you cannot make an offer on it.
If your company operates on both the buyer and the supplier side, you may well see a demand opened by a colleague in the Marketplace; but the place to manage that demand is My Demands, not the offer side.
Possible cause 2 — The demand is no longer open for offers
The buyer may have closed or cancelled the demand, or the demand may have been completed and turned into an order. A demand that has been delisted produces the same result. In this case, the following screen opens instead of the demand detail:
This demand is no longer available
It may have closed or been delisted. Browse the other open demands in the marketplace.
The screen also carries a Back to marketplace button.
Once you see this screen, the demand no longer appears in the Marketplace list either; closed, cancelled, completed and delisted demands do not enter the list.
Demands whose Offer deadline has passed are a separate case: the demand may keep appearing in the Marketplace for a while and its detail may keep showing the Make an offer button, but offers are no longer accepted. When you prepare and submit your offer, it comes back with a warning telling you the demand is no longer open for offers. For that reason, check the Offer deadline row on the Demand details card before you start preparing an offer.
Possible cause 3 — An itemised demand has no products at all
On demands priced line by line, the offer items come from the products the buyer has listed; you cannot add items yourself. You recognise such a demand from the item-count badge above its title, for example "5 items"; if the badge reads 0 items, the buyer has not listed any products. No offer can be prepared in this case, and on the Items step you will see:
This demand has no line items — you cannot submit an offer on it.
From this screen, the Back to demand button takes you back to the demand detail.
Possible cause 4 — A package or allowance restriction
Submitting an offer requires an active seller package. If you do not have one, you usually notice it at the very first step: when you open the Marketplace, instead of the demand list you get the package selection screen headed "A seller package is required to access the marketplace". If you do reach an offer submission anyway, the same check applies there too, and the warning "You need an active seller package to submit offers." appears together with an Upgrade package button.
If you do have a package but have used up that week's offer allowance, the message reads: "You've reached this week's offer limit. Upgrade your package to submit more offers." Every package comes with a set number of weekly offers. You can see the weekly limits of the packages on the Plans & pricing page, and how many offers you have used this week — along with when your allowance resets — in the Weekly offer usage counter under Settings › Usage.
What to do
- Open the demand detail and look at the action card on the right: is there a note, or a button?
- If the note says "This is your own demand", manage this demand as a buyer through My Demands.
- If the "This demand is no longer available" screen opened, use the Back to marketplace button to return to the list.
- Check the Offer deadline row on the Demand details card; if the date has passed, no further offers can be submitted on this demand.
- If the warning concerns your package or your weekly allowance, review your plans via Upgrade package and confirm your usage under Settings › Usage.
- If none of these applies, go back to the Marketplace and look for a demand in the same category that is still open.
There is no need to ask the buyer why the demand was closed; closed demands are not reopened. When a similar need arises again, the buyer publishes a new demand, and that demand will appear in the Marketplace once more. To avoid missing it, you can save the filters you are interested in and check the list at regular intervals.