Business Overview

GSA Advantage is your one stop shopping resource for IT and office products, tools, hardware, medical equipment, furniture, services and more. Products and services are available from various programs:

• GSA and VA Federal Supply Schedules Schedule products and services are delivered to you directly from the contractor. Delivery times may vary with location. New Federal Supply Schedule products/services are being added daily. Click on e-Library for a complete listing of the Schedules and Contractors currently available on GSA Advantage. When you buy Schedule items, an email notification that your order is available to download is immediately sent to the vendor. The vendor then ships directly to you and is responsible for your order.
• GSA Global Supply Program All GSA Global Supply items shown as "in stock" on GSA Advantage are available in your area as of midnight, Eastern Time, and are usually delivered within 2-7 days. Sometimes, an item may become out of stock between midnight and the time you place your order.
• Please Note: Orders from outside the continental U.S. will take slightly longer to deliver and may be subject to additional charges.
• GSA Special Order Program GSA SOP NSNs are delivered directly from the contractor and delivery times will vary. When a GSA SOP NSN is added to the shopping cart, the item will be listed as "direct delivery". The estimated delivery time is displayed with the item.

Find GSA Advantage job aid: GSA Advantage Job Aid

Since Advantage is the storefront for the products offered at GSA, it has several component parts:

1. User interface to browse Products and Services
2. Catalog Ingestion and Processing
3. Purchase Order Management
4. Order Processing and Fulfillment

New Features

1. Product Details improvements (including data quality feedback)
2. Search results download
3. Billing Address Zip Code
4. PO Portal for EDI

1a. Product Details page enhancements for enriched products.
Enhanced the data quality of the products using enriched data from VPP (Verified Product Portal) to improve the customer experience. These included using a better product name from VPP if it exists, adding the product brand name, and reordering the product description sections to display an enriched description first followed by the vendor provided product description. Also enabled the capability for VPP enriched products to have dynamic specifications divided into groupings with a descriptive header/name in the Specifications section of the Product Details page. This included support for advanced media types such as videos and 360 views.
1b. Product Data Quality feedback
Added a link on the Product Detail pages to open a form to collect feedback about the product information so that customers can report issues and so that we can improve data quality and enhance the customer experience. The feedback can be reported by logged-in as well as non-logged-in users. There are 14 available issue types, arranged into useful groups (Regulatory, Inventory, Pricing, Product Information, Media, and Other) in a nested dropdown list. After each submission, an email will be sent with the collected information to the CMO data quality email group. One feature of the email is an active link in the email to open Advantage on the exact Product Detail page.
2. Search results download
Implemented a product search results download capability per request from OPC(Office of the Policy) to support FAR case 2020 and section 8089(NDAA) for certain users (the agency must be GSA). A new "Download Results" button near the top of the Expanded View search results page can export the search results to a CSV format file with certain data. This enables a GSA group to search for manufacturers who are actually prohibited from selling on GSA Advantage.
3. Billing Address Zip Code in Purchase orders
GSA Advantage previously did not collect any billing address data when users add a purchase card to their account. Vendors had been requesting the billing address to also be included on orders coming from GSA Advantage since their banks required the billing address to authorize the purchase card transactions. Vendors often have to call the customer directly to ask for this information, and sometimes have a hard time getting this information from the customer. In order to avoid privacy concerns, it was determined that the Billing Address Zip Code could be collected (without any other components of the address).This new capability allows users to add that 5 digit value to their purchase card information. The ability to use that card (and send the Billing Address Zip Code to the vendor) for purchase card orders on GSA Advantage improves the efficiency and timeliness of payment card processing and order fulfillment.
4. PO Portal for EDI
GSA Advantage has the ability to access Purchase Orders through the PO Portal application which is used by Vendors to update the status/ tracking information. This was extended to EDI orders so that all MAS Contractors are now able to access and use PO Portal with full functionality and allow them to make PO updates (e.g., status, tracking information, etc.).

Key Outcomes of New Features

• Daily monitoring and in depth analysis of Advantage customer feedback by data quality analysts for future online enhancements and improvements
• Increased order status updates by vendors on existing purchase orders and timely updates of the order history pages for buyer view.
• Efficient and Timely order fulfillment of Purchase orders generated in GSAAdvantage by MAS vendors.
• Enhance the search functionality in GSA Advantage to support the Office of Policy(OPC) in the implementation of FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulation)CASE 2020 and Section 889(NDAA)

Metrics

PO Portal enhancements to capture EDI orders
Orders with status increased to 88.9 %

How many orders area including Billing Zip
Total Advantage! POs: 70,614
--Advantage! Billing Zip POs: 37,594
Total e-Buy POs: 252
--e-Buy Billing Zip POs: 115

PO Portal: There was an increase of 135 vendors in active PO Portal users (EDI)