Why Suppliers Hate Your Portal and What You Can Do About It

See onboarding through your suppliers’ eyes, and fix what’s broken.

The Problem: Supplier Portals Weren’t Built for Suppliers

You may have invested in a secure, ERP-integrated onboarding portal that checks every compliance box. But if suppliers are still getting stuck, delaying submissions, or abandoning the process altogether, the issue likely isn’t their capability, it’s the experience. Most supplier portals were built to serve internal system needs, not supplier usability. That disconnect creates unnecessary friction at one of the most critical moments in the supplier relationship.

What Suppliers Say Is Broken

Suppliers consistently express frustration over rigid and redundant onboarding processes. Many encounter confusing multi-step portals that require separate logins for each client. Others report entering the same information repeatedly, with no visibility into progress or confirmation of receipt. When issues arise, support is often hard to find, or nonexistent.

A 2023 Wakefield Procurement Survey captured this sentiment clearly:

“We have to re-register with every customer like it’s the first time we’ve ever done business.”

The Business Cost of a Bad Experience

These frustrations don’t just impact suppliers, they impact your business. Poor onboarding experience delays sourcing and go-live dates, increases the burden on internal support teams, and often leads to supplier drop-off. More importantly, it limits access to cost savings and innovation by weakening supplier engagement from the outset.

According to TealBook and Wakefield Research, 30% of suppliers abandon onboarding entirely due to confusing or broken portal processes. That’s a direct hit to procurement efficiency and agility.

What Great Onboarding Looks Like

Top-performing procurement teams approach onboarding not as a checkbox activity but as a relationship moment. They reduce form fields to what’s truly essential, pre-fill information using trusted data sources like Graphite Connect, and keep suppliers informed with real-time status updates and automated reminders. Onboarding is often completed in under five business days, with suppliers receiving clear guidance and timely support throughout.

Quick Fixes You Can Implement Now

Take Action

Improving supplier experience isn’t just about making things easier, it’s about unlocking speed, building trust, and reducing long-term costs. Your supplier portal is often the first impression of your procurement operation. If it’s clunky, slow, or unclear, that impression can be hard to recover from.

Reframe onboarding as a chance to start strong. With the right fixes, your portal can become a driver of procurement performance, not a barrier.