Online bid sites

[CanuckSigns]

I wanted to gauge everyone's thoughts on companies and government bodies switching their bids and tenders to a third party service that charges an annual fee to access/bid on them.

We've noticed more and more recently that clients are switching to these sites and now require a paid membership just to submit a bid. I assume the bid site offers some type of kickback for this.

Years ago we signed up to one of these sites and bid on quite a few projects and won exactly zero of them. We decided it was a waste of time and money.

Has anyone has a positive experience with these sites?

 

[Notarealsignguy]

You really have no choice. I don't think it's right but you can't fight city hall. It's just a service to advertise bids and answer questions to a group and probably helps with any legal challenges they may receive on bid awards. Onvia demandstar is what I always used for govt bids when I was in equipment sales. That was over 10 years ago so it's not really new. The nice thing is that it's easy to find bids. Bad thing is that you pay for it. I tied up some real good contracts through it back then so to answer your question, yes it does work.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

I think there are lower hanging fruit than wasting time with those bidding sites.

Our local school district reached out to me and asked me to sign up for the service they use so they could use me. I had to pay $100-something which I just padded into the invoice. They never put any of the jobs they asked me about out on bid.. and they were usually 5-figure jobs.

 

[fuzzy_cam]

I think there are lower hanging fruit than wasting time with those bidding sites.

Our local school district reached out to me and asked me to sign up for the service they use so they could use me. I had to pay $100-something which I just padded into the invoice. They never put any of the jobs they asked me about out on bid.. and they were usually 5-figure jobs.

SAME. I signed up on several of the local-ish bid sites which were free and have spent countless hours bidding on jobs, just to lose them to whoever their preferred vendor is. Heck, our local ISD has one we had to sign up with, and not a single job we've done for them over the past two years has gone through that portal.

I won't waste any more time with them (bid sites, paid or unpaid).

 

[visual800]

Unless your cheapest I wouldnt waste your time. Because that is all they care about

 

[CanuckSigns]

Unless your cheapest I wouldnt waste your time. Because that is all they care about

That has been my experience as well.

 

[White Haus]

Are you talking about Merx or something similar? I've perused it a couple of times and have considered signing up just to be able to bid on some of the big government jobs, but never got around to it. We're already on the list of approved vendors for some of the provincial bodies but even when I bid aggressively we don't get the jobs.

I'd love to start getting bigger government contracts but without an estimating department and huge buying power I see it as something that is hard to get into.

 

[CanuckSigns]

Are you talking about Merx or something similar? I've perused it a couple of times and have considered signing up just to be able to bid on some of the big government jobs, but never got around to it. We're already on the list of approved vendors for some of the provincial bodies but even when I bid aggressively we don't get the jobs.

I'd love to start getting bigger government contracts but without an estimating department and huge buying power I see it as something that is hard to get into.

Hey Pat, I've not heard of Merx before, but it sounds similar to the ones I've seen.

I just recently had a private company we do a tiny amount of work for ( about $150 a year) send us a notice that they have switched to a service for processing invoices and we would now need to pay an annual fee of $100 in order to send them invoices...

 

[White Haus]

Hey Pat, I've not heard of Merx before, but it sounds similar to the ones I've seen.

I just recently had a private company we do a tiny amount of work for ( about $150 a year) send us a notice that they have switched to a service for processing invoices and we would now need to pay an annual fee of $100 in order to send them invoices...

Damn... that would be a tough decision! I'd tell them to pound sand, personally. If it was a big account you could easily recoup those costs, but for $150/yr....no thanks!

 

[ikarasu]

Most government and public owned companies goto tender. Not sure how it is in Ontario... But over here that means most are out on bcbid or goto queens printers who send stuff out to specific companies to be bid on.

I believe BC bid is like $100 a month... Then some of the bigger contracts have a $100 bid fee.

Not just that.. but a few tenders we've done for the government requires you to put a deposit down that's worth 25% of the job.... One job we won for $60,000 to redo a pier with all new signange and wraps required us to give them a cheque worth 15k... And we got no payment or anything until it was done.

It's a way to make sure smaller companies don't bid on stuff they can't handle, finish a quarter of the job and then walk away from it.

We do a lot of bid sites as most of our work is government and larger jobs. I can say they don't always go for the lowest dollar bids, we've been 30% higher and still got the job. But we've been doing it for 25+ years and most of the companies are ones we've worked with before.

They can be lucrative... And you may just need to stick with it for longer and be picky on which ones you bid on so you're not wasting time. All you need is one job and the fees for the year are paid for.


Now on the other hand. We do 90% of the work for a utility company here. But they're publically owned so everything has to be tendered... Everything. There was a 10 page bid, about 10 forms to submit.... An hour's worth of work easily... For a single, $10 item. We still did it because of who it was... But the fact that they had to put it on a bid site was ridiculous. Jumping through hoops to produce a single decal....

So bid sites can be good, and they can be bad. Once you become established by all the purchasers of the repeat companies and get your foot in the door, it can be worth it. We usually go in a little cheaper for new companies / purchasers and slowly creep the price up to where it should be on following jobs just to get our foot in the door.


How close are you to Perth? We just completed 20,000 street signs by winning the job on a bid site! Which is another great thing... We can bid on jobs 2000 miles away because of bid sites.