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.
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.
Bulk import is being rebuilt on the newer skin
On the newer (v2) admin theme, the Import button currently only shows a confirmation toast — it does not open the working upload dialog yet. Bulk vendor import is fully functional on the classic (v1) admin theme. If you need to migrate a large seller list today, switch to the classic theme for that step.
Bulk-importing vendors from a CSV
On the classic (v1) admin theme, Import 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.
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 status | Whether they've started identity verification yet |
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.
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.