Messaging and privacy

Talking to the other side through a demand, reporting inappropriate content, and who can see what under the sealed-bid rule.

By Atilla Ilhan KARTAL

• 3 articles

Adding a teammate to a conversation

Adding a teammate to a conversation A demand conversation does not have to be a one-person affair. You can bring a technical colleague from your purchasing side, or the manager who assesses pricing with you, into the very same conversation. That way nobody has to copy messages and forward them by email; everyone sits in the same room and sees the same information. As the invite window itself puts it: Add someone from your company. Offers and conversation will be shared with them. Where to open the invite window The invite is opened from inside a conversation with a supplier. 1. Open the relevant demand from My Demands and switch to the Messages tab. 2. Select the supplier you want to talk to from the list on the left; the conversation opens on the right. 3. Click the people icon (Invite teammate) to the left of the message composer. There is a second route to the same window: click the round participant icons in the conversation header, or the supplier's name, and the Participants window opens; the Invite teammate button there takes you to the same list. If the conversation has been closed (you will see This conversation is closed — read only. at the bottom), neither the message composer nor the invite button is shown. Who appears in the list Only members of your own company appear in the list that opens. Each row shows the person's initial and name. - People already in the conversation do not appear in the list. That makes it practically impossible to add the same person a second time; even if you did, the second addition would change nothing, and nobody is ever listed twice. - There is no need to add yourself; you are already in the conversation, so your own name does not appear in the list either. - If there is nobody left to add from your company, you will see Everyone from your company is already in this conversation. - If the list fails to load, the warning Couldn't load. Please try again. appears along with a Retry button. In that case an empty list is never assumed; the error itself is shown. You cannot add an employee of the other side. This is an absolute rule: people from another company never appear in the list at all, and the system will not accept anyone from outside being added. Someone who has left your company, or whose account has been suspended, cannot be brought into the conversation either. Sending the invite When you click a person in the list, the row is marked as selected. Then press the Send invite button. Once the invite goes through, the window returns to the Participants list, where you will see the person you have just added. When the conversation holds more than two people, a Group label and the participant count appear in the header, and the round icons at the top multiply. In the Participants window, each row shows the name, the company and the side (Buyer side / Supplier side). The first two rows represent the two sides of the conversation — the buyer company and the supplier company — and carry the Owner label; people added later are listed beneath them. On your own row you will see the You label instead of Owner. What the other side sees The person you added also appears in the other side's participant list — by name, and with your company's name. In other words, the supplier knows that one more person from the buyer company has joined the conversation. Users' underlying identity records, however, are never shared between the parties. The other side sees the name, the company and which side the person is on; the person's underlying user identity never crosses over. The privacy rule works both ways: you likewise do not see the user identities of the people on the supplier side. Why this works In natural stone purchasing, the decision is not made on price alone: vein direction, thickness tolerance, surface finish and delivery timing are usually the responsibility of different people. Bringing the buyer and the technical lead into the same conversation spares the supplier from being asked the same question twice, keeps the answer from getting lost inside your team, and speeds up offer evaluation. The conversation still remains specific to that one demand: the invite brings the person into the room belonging to the demand and supplier you selected, and does not carry them into any other conversation. The person's permission to see demands and offers comes from their membership in your company; the invite does not widen that permission.

Last updated on Jul 29, 2026

Sealed bids: who sees what?

On MarbleMap, offers are collected under a sealed-bid process. This page explains who sees what around a demand, and which details a company profile shares and which it keeps private. The core principle The rule you also see on the demand screen is this: Bids are sealed — competitor offers and counts are hidden. In practice, every supplier prepares its own offer independently of the others. The buyer sees all offers together; suppliers see only their own. What the buyer sees On a demand you opened yourself (the demand detail under My Demands): 1. The Offers tab lists every offer received on the demand; you can narrow the field down and compare the ones you move to a shortlist (max 6 offers per shortlist) side by side. 2. In the Messages tab you run a separate conversation with each supplier. Suppliers cannot enter one another's conversations. 3. From the offer list, click the name of the bidding company to open that company's profile. The My private note field on an offer row belongs to you alone; as the on-screen hint states, "Only you can see this — never shown to the supplier". What the supplier does not see When you open a demand from Marketplace, you see the demand itself, its product lines, the delivery details and the offer deadline. What you do not see is the following: - How many offers the demand has received - Which companies have submitted offers - Competing offers' prices, line items, delivery terms (Incoterm) and lead times - Where your own offer ranks - Correspondence between competitors and the buyer — not even whether such correspondence exists That last point is deliberate: when you ask for a conversation that does not belong to you, the system does not say "you are not authorised" — it says "not found" outright. That way you cannot work out indirectly whether a competitor has engaged with the demand. What happens in a split award Instead of awarding a demand to a single supplier, a buyer may split the lines across several suppliers. In that case only your own share is shown to you: the lines assigned to you and the value of that share. The other winning companies, the lines that went to them and their amounts remain hidden. Your Approve or Decline decision is applied only to your own slice; it does not change the other winners' lines or amounts. The buyer's identity is open to suppliers Sealing applies to the offer side, not to the demand owner. While reviewing a demand on the marketplace you see the buying company's name, and you can click the company name to open the buyer's company profile. This lets you decide with full knowledge of who you are quoting. "Why can't I see competitors' prices?" You cannot, because we do not show them. This is not a fault; it is a founding rule of the platform. If everyone could see a competitor's price, offers would reflect undercutting by a notch rather than real cost. The sealed-bid process encourages you to put your best offer forward the first time. "I can't find the conversation I'm looking for" If you cannot find a conversation, it most likely does not belong to you. Every conversation is established between one demand and one supplier company. As a supplier you see only your own conversation; as a buyer you have a separate conversation with each supplier, and they are not gathered into a single list — you need to select the relevant supplier inside Messages. What is open to everyone on a company profile A company profile is visible only to users signed in to MarbleMap. The details open to the other party are: - Company name, country and region - The description in the About section - Logo and cover image - Selected stone categories (What they supply / What they source) - Languages - Capability tags - Verification status (Verified business, Verification pending or Not verified) - Masked VAT number (only the final digits are visible) - The number of certificates on file - Portfolio gallery images - Year founded, employee count and the Main contact role What a company profile does not share The following is never shown to the other party: - Phone number - The full VAT number (only the masked form is visible) - The contact person's name - The certificate files themselves (only how many there are is visible) - A website whose visibility is set to Connections only Email addresses are never shared under any circumstances — neither on the profile nor on any other screen. How contact is made The only way to reach the other party is the Messages section on the relevant demand. Harvesting a phone number or email address from a profile and taking the conversation off-platform is not possible. This keeps the correspondence on the demand's record and keeps the sealed-bid arrangement intact.

Last updated on Jul 29, 2026

Messaging on a demand and reporting inappropriate content

On MarbleMap, correspondence takes place inside the deal you are working on. Below you will find how buyers and suppliers run a conversation, which actions you can take on a message, how automatic translation works, and how to report inappropriate content. Conversations are always tied to a demand There is no general inbox on the platform. Every conversation is tied to a single demand and a single supplier. In other words, you cannot message a person independently of a demand; if you are talking to the same supplier about two different demands, those are two separate conversations. This structure protects the sealed-bid model: a supplier cannot see another supplier's conversation, or even learn that it exists. Running a conversation as a buyer 1. Open the relevant demand from the My Demands screen. 2. Switch to the Messages tab. 3. Pick the supplier you want to talk to from the Conversations list on the left. 4. The correspondence opens in the panel on the right; type your message and press Send. You must have a supplier selected on the left before you can write a message. While no supplier is selected, the right-hand side shows only Select a conversation and no compose box appears. The list also includes suppliers that have submitted an offer to you but that you have never exchanged messages with. When you select such a row, the conversation opens empty and you can start it by writing the first message yourself. Asking questions as a supplier Open the demand detail from the Marketplace and press the Messages button. The conversation opens over the same screen. You can also ask questions before submitting an offer. Two conditions apply: the demand must be live on the marketplace, and you must have an active seller package. No conversation opens for an account without a package, or for a demand that is no longer listed. As a supplier, you only see your own conversation. The correspondence of other companies bidding on the same demand is never visible to you in any way. After the demand closes A demand that has been closed or removed from the marketplace no longer opens in the Marketplace, so if you never submitted an offer on it, there is no route left to the conversation. If you did submit an offer, your conversation stays open: go to My Marketplace Offers, open the offer detail, and continue the correspondence with the Messages button there. There is no such restriction on the buyer side; you can open your own demand from My Demands and enter the Messages tab even after the demand has closed. What you can do with a message The Send button next to the compose box delivers your message. Right-clicking a message on desktop opens a small action menu: - Reply — you answer by quoting that message; the quote appears as a small box above your new message. - Edit — visible only on your own messages. An edited note appears next to a message that has been edited. - Delete — visible only on your own messages. - Pin — flags the message; the message you pinned most recently is shown in the strip at the top of the conversation. You can undo it with Unpin from the same menu. If you want to search within a conversation, press the magnifier button in the header and type into the Search in conversation… field. What happens to a deleted message When you delete a message, the text disappears on the other side as well; This message was deleted is left in its place. If someone had previously replied to the deleted message with a quote, the quote in that reply is emptied too. So a deleted text does not remain visible, not even by way of a quote. Automatic translation The message you send is automatically translated into the first language listed on the other party's company profile. If no language at all is defined on their profile, the translation is made into English. The reader sees the translation first on screen; to view the source text, they only need to press the link shown as Original (EN) below the message — the code of the language the text was written in appears in the parentheses. If a message cannot be translated, it still reaches the other party — only the translation is missing, your text is not lost. To make sure messages are translated into the right language on your own side, fill in the Languages field on the My company profile page via Edit profile. If this field is empty, messages sent to you by the other party are translated into English. Reporting inappropriate content If the content of a demand breaches the rules, use the Report link on the demand detail page. This link is available on the demand screen on the buyer side, on the demand detail in the Marketplace, and on the Make an Offer screen. In the Report content dialog that opens: 1. Pick a heading from the Reason list: Sexual content, Violence, Spam, Scam / fraud, Illegal content or Other. 2. If you wish, write details that will help the review into the Note (optional) field. 3. Press Submit report. Your report lands in the MarbleMap team's review queue. There is no separate page where you can track the status of a report. If you try to report the same content a second time, no new record is created; you will see the You have already reported this. notice.

Last updated on Jul 29, 2026