Managing Vendors: List & Applications
What multi-vendor selling means in practice, how to invite and review vendors, and how to keep your marketplace healthy day to day.
Before you invite your first seller, it helps to understand what changes once your store becomes a marketplace — and what stays exactly the same for your customers.
What "multi-vendor" means in practice
In a single-vendor store, your team manages every product and ships every order. In a marketplace, each vendor is a mini-shop inside your brand. Customers browse and buy as normal — they never see any friction from the multi-vendor layer underneath.
Behind the scenes, the right vendor receives the order, ships it from their own warehouse, handles returns under their own return policy, and gets paid their share of the sale after your commission is deducted. As the marketplace owner, you decide:
- Who can sell — by direct invitation, by open application, or both.
- What commission each vendor pays you — set individually, so a new seller and a top performer can be on different rates.
- How tightly you supervise them — every vendor operates inside the guardrails you set. They cannot see other vendors' data, access platform finances, or change store-wide settings.
Revenue sharing at a glance
For every order a vendor fulfils, the platform automatically calculates: vendor payout = order value − your commission %. Payouts are tracked in real time and released on your schedule. See Finance: Payouts, Settlements & Invoicing for the full money-split mechanics.
The Vendors screen
Go to Vendors to see every seller on your platform.
You can:
- Search by name using the search field above the table.
- Filter by status — All, Active, Pending, Invited, Suspended, Rejected.
- Invite a vendor — click Invite Vendor to open the invite form, where you enter their name, email, business name, and the commission rate you want them on. An invitation email is sent automatically.
- Bulk import vendors — click Import to upload a spreadsheet of vendors, useful if you're migrating an existing seller network onto BillionBiz.
- Suspend or reactivate — suspending a vendor immediately blocks them from receiving new orders while preserving their full history. It's reversible at any time with Reactivate.
On the newer (v2) admin theme, a strip of summary tiles sits above the table: Total Vendors, Active and Pending applications, plus GMV on this page when the vendor rows include GMV figures. A tile shows a dash while its figure is still loading. On a desktop the tiles pack as many columns as fit. On a phone (640px wide or less) they lay out in two even columns, and if the number of tiles is odd the last tile spans the full row rather than sitting alone beside an empty slot.
Each row shows the vendor's name, member-since date, product count, gross merchandise value (GMV), commission rate, and status. Click a row to open that vendor's full detail screen — see Vendor Detail & Performance Leaderboard.
Where to find Import on the newer (v2) admin theme
On the newer (v2) admin theme the page header's main action is Invite vendor, and the bulk import sits in the header's overflow menu as Bulk import. It opens the same Bulk Import Vendors dialog as the classic Import button, so the steps below are identical on both themes.
Bulk-importing vendors from a CSV
Import (or Bulk import on the v2 theme) opens a three-step wizard rather than a single file picker. Each step is tracked at the top of the dialog so you always know where you are.
Download the template and upload your CSV
Click Download Template to get a CSV pre-filled with the expected headers — businessName,
contactEmail, contactPhone, businessType, commissionPercent, notes — and one example row.
Fill it in with your seller list, then drag it onto the drop zone (or click to browse) to upload.
Only .csv files are accepted, up to 2 MB. A larger file shows This CSV is larger than 2 MB. Split it into smaller files and try again. and nothing is uploaded. If the server rejects the file, the red notice shows its reason (for example a missing header). Only a rejection with no reason shows Import failed. Please try again.
Preview: check which rows are valid
After upload, the dialog shows a preview table of every row from your file, with a count of how many are valid and how many are invalid. Rows with a problem are highlighted and show the specific validation error under that row (for example, a bad commission percentage or a duplicate email) so you can fix your spreadsheet and re-upload if needed. Invalid rows are excluded automatically — only valid rows can move forward.
Confirm the import
The final step shows how many vendors are about to be imported. Click Import to create them in your marketplace.
Reviewing vendor applications
Go to Vendors → Applications to see a queue of every vendor who has applied but not yet been approved or rejected.
Each row shows:
| Field | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Business name & logo | The applicant's shop identity |
| Applied on | The date they applied |
| Source | Invited (you sent them an invite) or Self Sign-up (they found your public application link) |
| KYC | Where their identity verification stands: Not started, Submitted, Verified or Rejected. The same four names appear under KYC status when you open a vendor's details panel from the vendor list |
Open an application
Click any row to see the applicant's full details.
Approve or reject
Click Approve to move them to active status immediately, or Reject — rejections require a reason, which is shared with the applicant so they understand why.
Process several at once, if needed
Select multiple applications and use the bulk-action option to approve or reject a batch with a shared reason.
Vendor teams
Each vendor can have its own admin and staff. You manage them on Team → Vendor teams (new admin skin, v2), not on the Vendors screen.
Open Vendor teams
Go to Team → Vendor teams. Each vendor has a card listing its people with a Vendor admin or Vendor staff badge and an Active, Invited or Inactive status. A vendor with nobody on it reads "No one yet. Add the vendor's admin first. Most vendors need 1 admin and 2–3 staff."
Add to this vendor
Click Add to this vendor on the vendor's card. Enter First name, Last name, Email and choose the Role. The first person defaults to Vendor admin, later ones to Vendor staff.
Send the invite
Click Send invite. The person shows as Invited until they accept.
Vendor people use the same plan seats as your own team. The banner on the page reads "Vendor people share your plan seats: N of your M used seats are vendor team members." If your plan has no free seat, the dialog shows "Your plan has no free seat for another person." Upgrade in Billing or remove someone, then try again. You can also expand Vendor teams in the seat strip on Team → Team to see every vendor and its members.
When a teammate has not accepted, the status reads Invited, or Invite expired once the email link has lapsed. As the store owner, open the three-dot button on their row and choose Resend invite to send a fresh link; the result shows as a note at the top of that vendor's card. Past 10 vendors the page splits into pages (Vendors per page: 10, 25 or 50, default 25), so if a vendor seems missing check the page arrows under the list.
A Vendor Admin who opens Team → Vendor teams sees only a read-only card titled Your team. They cannot add people from there, and never see another vendor's people.
See Team: People, Seats & Access for the full page.
Keeping the marketplace healthy
The combination of the vendor performance leaderboard, per-vendor KYC verification, and the ability to suspend any seller instantly gives you the governance tools a marketplace needs:
- Reward top performers with lower commission rates.
- Put underperforming sellers on review by suspending their listing ability — without deleting their history.
- Reject bad-faith applicants before they ever go live.
Because your commission is a percentage of every vendor's sales, your revenue grows directly with your vendors' success — there's no incentive misalignment between you and the sellers on your platform.