Who is this FAQ page for?
All suppliers to the UK residential estate or lettings agency industry
What does it cost to become a Marketplace supplier?
Setting up your Supplier Account is free. If you decide to connect your product so that it is fully integrated and available for agents to buy via their Marketplace account, there is a Supplier Connection fee of £75+vat per month, which is refundable against your Marketplace commissions. In other words, it is only incurred until you are making sales of your product where the commission chargeable exceeds £75 per product.
If you are the first supplier in your product category to begin the connection process, you can apply for Primary Partner status. If accepted, the monthly connection fee is waived.
How do I access my Suppliers Dashboard?
Create your free Supplier Account by registering your company at https://bestagent.partners/ You can then login to access your Dashboard from the same address at any time.
What is a Supplier Dashboard?
The supplier dashboard is where you can connect your products to the Marketplace so that they can be offered to agents within the Marketplace. Once your connection is tested and up and running, the dashboard is where you will administer all of your customers. This is where you can view how many customers have signed up to your product or service via the Marketplace. You can see statements of your monthly income. You can edit your services or products. You can apply discounts to some customers. Essentially the dashboard is all the activity that is happening between your customers and you that are connected via BestAgent Marketplace.
You will be able to view BestAgent Marketplace news, blog, My account and activate your product connections.
What is BestAgent Marketplace?
BestAgent Marketplace is a free platform for residential agents which automates their basic daily tasks, and allows them to sign up to suppliers without duplication of data entry. It allows suppliers to the industry to offer their products and services in an integrated way, effectively allowing supplier products to talk to each other to remove data duplication for the agents.
How does the Marketplace work?
It is similar to Amazon, in the sense that any supplier can list their product for sale in a marketplace where the customer, in this case, small residential agents, can buy or sign up to any supplier product or service in one place, with a single payment facility and a single monthly bill for all their subscription services. A 10% or 20% marketplace commission will be applied to your sales, depending on what type of product you are offering.
How do I set up a supplier account?
To set up a supplier account you need to go to:
You can register for free with your company name and contact details. Your application will be checked to verify you are a genuine industry supplier. You will be notified when you have been accepted.
What do I have to do on an ongoing basis to be part of the marketplace?
Once you have connected your products it is all automated (assuming your product is suitable for an online sign up. If not, there may be a small delay when an agent signs up to your service to allow you to process any manual tasks to activate their account). You can see you customer base grow and track the income you receive.
Do I have to pay for a supplier account?
You can register for free but to connect your products you will need to pay the £75 +vat per month connection fee. This is refundable against commissions on sales of your product in the Marketplace. Once your sales commissions exceed £75 per month, the connection fee is effectively removed.
What is the difference between a free supplier account and connecting for £75 + VAT per month?
There are two different areas within the dashboard. The first stage of the dashboard is what you get access to once you have registered and been accepted. Here you can be kept up to date with the latest Marketplace news and you have the option to connect for £75+VAT a month. Please note only accepted suppliers will have these options, you need to be registered and accepted in order to have the option of connection to the Marketplace supplier platform.
The second stage of the dashboard is the connection area. You will only have access to this once you have activated your £75+VAT monthly connection fee. The fee gives you support and access to connect your product to the Marketplace and sell your product or service to agents. If you are the first supplier in your category to connect, you can apply for Primary Partner status and the connection fee will be waived if you are accepted. Primary Partner status is granted entirely at the discretion of BestAgent.
Can I sell my product or service to agents through the Marketplace without having a supplier account?
No. You need to register, be accepted, activate your connection service, and connect your product.
What are the Marketplace commissions?
There are two types of commissions payable by the supplier to BestAgent Marketplace.
Any automated Software as a Service products – 20% flat rate.
All other services eg, signboards, live chat services – 10% flat rate.
How do I connect to the Marketplace?
To connect your product or service to the Marketplace you need to go to bestagent.partners/
From here you will need to submit an application, if you are accepted you will have access to the supplier welcome page where you will need to activate a subscription for £75+VAT per month. Once your subscription is active you will have access to the connection steps.
What is the connection process?
- Register your supplier account at https://bestagent.partners
- Activate your Connection Set Up by paying £75pm or applying for Primary Partner status
- Select your Authentication method (if required)
- Add your product(s) by naming them, pricing them, and providing the description you’d like to appear in the My Suppliers section of the agents Marketplace view.
- Activate your technical connection as required (full instructions provided in the Connection Set up area – you’ll need to be able to work with the REST connection protocol.)
- Once successful connection testing is complete, the next stage is Billing testing, ensuring that the pricing and invoicing will work as expected for the agent.
- After billing testing, you will then choose your preferred Agent Set Up method. We will be actively encouraging products that offer an immediate online sign up process for agents. However, we accept that many supplier products are not yet suitable for instant sign up, and an alternative set up method will be provided.
- When all product, billing and product set up processes have been successfully implemented, you will then be asked to perform a beta test of your product with an agent in the live environment. Once the agent confirms the product and billing all behave as expected, your product will then be ready for full release into the Marketplace for all agents to sign up to.
Is there a contract?
There is no tie in, you can register for free and if you connect for £75+ VAT per month you can cancel at any time, but any outstanding commissions for that month will need to be paid.
Full terms and conditions of sale of your products in the marketplace will be agreed before they go fully live. During testing and beta, there is no contract or obligation on either BestAgent or suppliers.
How do we as suppliers price our products?
It is entirely up to you what you charge for your products. You will be required to publish a “Marketplace Price”, which will only be viewable to agents who have active accounts. You will also have access to a Billing Administration panel on your supplier’s dashboard where you will be able to apply individual discounts to individual customers at your discretion. In the case you have more than one product, you simply apply these processes to each product separately.
Who is allowed to be a supplier in the Marketplace?
BestAgent Marketplace accepts all applications from legitimate suppliers to the estate agency industry.
What information is going to be transferred via the product connection?
Whatever the agent wants or needs to be transferred in order to ‘connect’ to a supplier product or service. As a supplier, you have complete control of what information you can send to the agent via the Marketplace, and if you need agent data sent to you, again, you can control which fields are sent as part of your set up process. In all cases, the agent, your customer will have to approve what data is being sent or in that case that you are sending information to the agent, you will have total control over what that is.
What volumes are expected in terms of new customers?
We will be phasing the release to control the quality of the user experience. To begin with, we will select one agent who has expressed a desire to use your product for live testing so we can all be sure that the connection works as it should for all parties concerned. When that is achieved for all suppliers, and once the Marketplace is fully populated with the supplier products that allow genuine one-click sign-up, it will be opened up to the entire market of 15,000 or more small agents. How many customers you win through it will be up to you. BestAgent will not be promoting any individual supplier products as we have to maintain impartiality and allow agents to choose for themselves.
Where does the information go and what data security measures/processes are in place?
BestAgent Marketplace will contain more residential property market data than anything to date. Much of this information will be personal and sensitive, so GDPR rules apply. The platform is built on the most advanced technology currently available, namely a Serverless application architecture, with microservices and multiple authentication requirements.
How is it going to work and what is the user journey going to look like?
BestAgent Marketplace is free to use for agents. Any single branch agent can create an account in seconds from any device, and immediately have access to all its features. The approach for agents is One Login, All your suppliers. Once they have created an account and activated it with their live data, they will have access to their ‘Marketplace Suppliers’ page. Put simply this is a list of all the supplier companies who have connected their products to the marketplace, where agents will be able to sign up to your service there and then and be instantly connected where possible. In the case that your service requires some manual configuration your side, the agent may have to wait for you to complete that. But in line with how the rest of the world works, we will be prioritising suppliers who can make the signup process to their products completely automated.
