At Public Spend Forum, we know the government marketplace is difficult for everyone to navigate. Government buyers have to jump through many hurdles and hoops to conduct market research and find the best contractors. At the same time, contractors and suppliers find working with government difficult and costly, not knowing whether their investments will yield results even after earning spots on multi agency vehicles like the GSA Schedules.
We engaged and listened to our community of over 15,000 government contracting professionals and suppliers and heard the same thing over and over: public sector market research shouldn’t be this hard. And having experienced this pain ourselves, we saw an opportunity to make an impact simply by helping the government and its contractors find each other more efficiently, leaving more time to spend on the difficult tasks of procurement.
Introducing GovShop!
Our goal to demystify market research is why we created GovShop, a one stop shop that helps buyers research and discover suppliers even in the toughest, fast changing markets. GovShop is built with four key things in mind:
- Provide government buyers an intuitive, modern search platform to easily start their market research and find public sector suppliers quickly.
- Utilize filters to create shortlists of relevant suppliers to facilitate the process of contacting or engaging those suppliers.
- Enable suppliers to create robust, accurate profiles to make relevant information more accessible to government buyers in one central place.
- Encourage suppliers to maintain their profiles and update them as necessary to promote connections with government professionals looking for their products or services.
Buyers will appreciate the simple to use interface and ability to search in multiple ways like keywords, category codes, and contract vehicles. No longer will you have to search multiple websites to find a suppliers DUNS number or their set-aside status; GovShop shows it all in a “one stop shop” supplier profile. Government contractors will appreciate the ability to customize their profile with the most up to date information about their products and services, lowering the effort and costs associated with public sector business development.
It’s free to use all of the basic features of GovShop, including creating and/or updating your company’s profile to show up on more searches by your ideal buyers. Let’s take a look at these features so you can use GovShop to find the right suppliers and do it faster.
Getting Started: Four Ways to Find your Ideal Suppliers
From the GovShop homepage, you can perform four basic searches: 1) by keyword, 2) by product or service category, 3) by contract vehicle, or 4) by searching and filtering all suppliers.
1. Keyword: Type any relevant keyword or supplier name into the search bar, and GovShop will show you matching results by product/service offering or by supplier name.
2. Product or Service Category: Try a Search by Products/Services Offerings to filter suppliers by categories like PSC codes, NAICS codes, NIGP codes (coming soon!) and PSF Markets curated specifically by our research team.
3. By Contract Vehicle: You can also search by contract vehicles like GSA Schedules to find suppliers of interest. We are bringing more multi-use contracts into GovShop with each new release, so if you have a vehicle that you would like to see represented inside of GovShop, let us know!
4. By Filter: Our selection of filters makes it easy to perform strategic market research on products or services of interest, for example when determining the degree of small business participation in a given category or market.
Any of GovShop’s four search techniques will take you to a results page to further refine your search for the ideal supplier using our dynamic filters.
Filter Results Based on Your Market Research Plan or Strategy
Results pages show relevant government contractors whose profiles match your search term(s). You can then “filter” the results to narrow your search in accordance with your market research plan or strategy (don’t have a plan in place? Check out this great resource). For example, you can filter by business size and socioeconomic set-aside eligibility and then continue to filter those results by category or contract vehicle.
By using our search and filter functions, you can quickly narrow down thousands of supplier profiles into a manageable few for more effective market research. For suppliers, claiming and keeping your profile up to date with accurate information is the best way to show up on these results pages.
Buyers Can Create “Shortlists” of Relevant Suppliers
To facilitate the market research process, GovShop makes it possible for buyers to add relevant, qualified suppliers to their “shortlist.” This can be helpful if you’re planning to contact these suppliers or conduct further research. Most GovShop profiles have company websites to facilitate this, but again this is where it is crucial for suppliers to claim and update their free profiles to ensure accuracy.
Once a buyer creates a free account on govshop, their shortlist will be maintained until they clear it out and create a new one. This helps buyers to conduct more relevant, impactful market research on the best suppliers for their needs.
Suppliers Claim and Update their Profiles for Easier Discovery
Govshop supplier profiles are based on our own expertise, research and proprietary approaches. They contain important information about suppliers including contact information, business size, eligibility for socioeconomic set-asides, and their product and service offerings. Buyers often use this basic information when developing their acquisition strategies, compiling qualified bidder lists, and determining the field of competition for various socioeconomic set-aside concerns.
Suppliers can add a lot more information to GovShop by claiming their company pages and adding more context and keywords about their offerings throughout their profile. This includes ensuring the accuracy and inclusion of key category identifiers like PSC code or NAICS code, including contract identifiers for multiagency ordering vehicles like GSA Schedules, and uploading useful content like case studies and capability statements.
Claiming your profile is easy to do. Simply search for your and access your company page and click on “Claim This Profile” in the top right corner of the screen:
After you claim your profile, you will be instructed to finish the account creation process by clicking on the link in a system-generated email that GovShop sends to your email address of record. After verifying your email address, our governance team will authenticate that your email address matches the company whose profile you are trying to claim. This is a necessary step for us to maintain the efficacy of the data in our platform, so we recommend that you only create an account using your company email address.
Updating the information in the basic profile is also simple, and free. For our best practices on creating strong, searchable profiles in GovShop, check out this resource on getting started.
Can’t find your company?
Even though we launch GovShop with over 180,000 suppliers, we can’t find them all! If your company doesn’t have a record, it is simple to create a brand new profile when you register a free supplier account in govshop. Remember to use your company email address for expedited authentication, and then follow the onboarding instructions to get up and running in minutes.
[Download this starter packet for creating a new profile on GovShop]
Our Mission is to Connect Buyers & Suppliers in Public Procurement
Govshop is a continuation of Public Spend Forum’s mission to connect buyers and suppliers in the public sector to enable more efficient, effective procurement. It will always be free for government buyers and for suppliers who wish to claim their basic profiles. We are excited to offer this market intelligence platform to all of our colleagues in the government marketplace, and hope that you will share any feedback with us.
Want a demo of govshop? Sign up here to make an appointment with our customer care team.
