Checking you qualify
The rules a host can set, how to read them before spending anything, and what to do when you nearly qualify but not quite.
Eligibility is fixed before bids open and cannot be adjusted after the host sees who bid. That protects you — nobody can move the goalposts once your price is visible — and it means a bid from an ineligible business goes nowhere no matter how good it is.
Check first. It takes a minute.
What a host can require
| Bidder type | Businesses, sales agents, or both |
| Business age | How long you have been trading |
| Completed engagements | How much you have finished here |
| Rating | Your standing, out of five |
| Compliance signals | Verified facts — registration, tax, export, quality, data protection, labour, environmental, customs classification |
| Geography | Domestic, export or global, with specific countries allowed or restricted |
| Category and industry | What you actually do |
Reading them honestly
The rules are visible before you bid. Read them against your own business rather than against the business you are planning to become.
Compliance signals are checked facts, not claims. If a tender requires quality certification and yours has lapsed, you do not qualify — asserting it in the bid text does not change that.
Track record minimums are the ones that catch new entrants. If you are new here, tenders requiring many completed engagements are closed to you for now. That is not permanent: it is the thing that changes fastest as you complete work.
When you do not qualify
Hosts can leave a note explaining why, and good ones do. Read it — it usually names the single rule you missed.
Then do the useful thing rather than the frustrating one:
See which rule it was
Usually one, not all of them.
Ask whether it is fixable
A missing compliance signal often is, and it qualifies you for every future tender requiring it, not just this one.
Build the track record the minimums are asking for
Enquiries and smaller tenders are where completed engagements and a rating come from. The requirement that excludes you today is a description of a gap, not a verdict.
Geography is where people are caught out
Domestic, export and global mean different things to a host who has thought about it and a host who accepted the default.
If a tender is domestic-only and you are abroad, no amount of shipping capability qualifies you. If it requires export registration and you have never exported, that is a document you can obtain rather than an argument you can win.
A rule you meet on paper and not in practice
You qualify, but the requirement is at the edge of what you can do.
Bid, and say so in the description. A host comparing bids would rather know the constraint now than discover it in delivery. Bidders who flag limits honestly and deliver get rated for it, and that rating is what gets you through the next host's minimums.
Overview
Bidding on someone else's tender — checking you actually qualify, deciding whether it is worth the fee, and what comes back when you lose.
Writing a bid
Answering the host's specification fields, pricing so the number can be trusted, proposing payment terms, and the mistakes that lose bids that should have won.