Guided Buying Overview

Maximize cost savings and drive purchasing compliance at your organization with Guided Buying and Buying Policies. Administrators can create policies based on sellers, orders, and products, and configure approval workflows based on specific purchasing thresholds. Furthermore, you can prefer, restrict, and block specific sellers, products, and product categories.

• Display messaging directs users within the shopping and checkout experience to answer the question "what can I buy?" 
• Search for and discover suppliers by a variety of factors, including federal and state diversity certifications, or by entering a known supplier’s name directly to save them as a preferred supplier.
  
• Administrators can also restrict debarred sellers and product categories based on UNSPSC taxonomy. Each policy can display a custom message alerting users that the item may not comply with your company’s purchasing policies, and approval workflows can be configured based on restricted category policies. 
• Restricting a category does not prevent a purchase, but it does add a warning. You must add an approver to route orders with restricted items for further review. The approver will make the decision regarding which items can be fulfilled.

Finally, you can block debarred sellers and product categories to prevent end users from adding specific products to their cart. The Add to Cart option will appear greyed out for any product categories that are blocked. If a buyer needs to purchase a blocked item, you can either mark that specific product as preferred to remove the blocked status or update the policy to restricted so they can add the product to their cart.

Business Prime customers can take advantage of the full Guided Buying benefit, depending on their plan. Learn more about Business Prime.