What is a response score?
A measure of whether a business actually responds after accepting an engagement. Why accountability after acceptance is the hard part.
A response score measures what happens after someone agrees to engage. Most marketplace reputation systems measure what happens before — ratings, reviews, badges — and those are easy to game and slow to update.
The problem it addresses
The common failure in B2B marketplaces is not fraud. It is silence. A buyer sends an enquiry, a supplier accepts it, and then nothing happens. The buyer has spent time and often money; the supplier has lost nothing.
Reviews do not fix this, because the interaction never got far enough for anyone to review.
What it is built from
Behaviour that the platform can observe directly rather than opinions it collects:
- Whether an accepted engagement received a response, and how quickly
- Whether engagements went stale after acceptance
- Post-engagement feedback from both sides, not just the buyer
Because it is derived from recorded events, it cannot be inflated by asking friends for reviews.
Why it has to be mutual
A one-sided score punishes suppliers for buyers who vanish. If a buyer raises enquiries and never replies to the businesses that accept them, that is the same failure in the other direction and should be equally visible.
On Bidancer
Accepted enquiries carry an assigned point of contact and a tracked response window. Failures feed the business's response score, and an enquiry that goes stale within 7 working days is refundable to the sender — so silence has a cost rather than being free. See how enquiries work.