Every field on the tender form, in the order you meet them, with what to type and the mistake each one invites. Written for a first tender. If you buy for a living, the headings alone will do.

You do not need a company to post one. An individual buying a single machine and a procurement team buying five hundred use the same form; where the answer differs, it says so.

Before you start

You need a wallet with USDC on Arc, enough for the budget plus your stake plus a little for gas. USDC is the gas token here, so there is no second currency to acquire.

The tender is funded the moment you post. That is the point, because a supplier can see the money is already there. It does mean you cannot post one to "see what comes back" without committing the funds.

Details

Type. RFQ when you know exactly what you want and are choosing mainly on price and delivery: five hundred scanners to a named specification. RFP when you are describing a problem and want suppliers to propose an approach, so their method is judged too. If in doubt, RFQ: it is the simpler contract and the faster round.

Visibility. Public lists the tender on the board for anyone to find. Invited restricts bidding to addresses you name, and is the only setting that actually restricts anyone. Everything else on this form is published rather than enforced. Public is the right default unless you have a reason.

Invited suppliers (invited only). One wallet address per line, or pasted comma-separated. Suppliers you have completed a job with are offered as one-click additions. You can invite more while bidding is still open, so a supplier who asks to be included is not shut out.

How bids are taken. Sealed hides every price until the reveal window; nobody can price against a rival and the award can be re-checked afterwards. Open publishes each bid as it arrives. Open suits commodities where price and speed decide, though suppliers who can watch each other to undercut can also watch each other to hold a price, and the audit page will record that this tender's prices were visible. For anything contestable, sealed.

Scope (or Problem statement in RFP mode). What you are buying, in enough detail that two suppliers would quote the same thing. 500 barcode scanners, 2D, USB-C, 2-year warranty is a good scope. Barcode scanners is not, and you will get five quotes for five different products and no way to compare them. Put the specification here and the commercial detail in the terms document.

Category and Delivery region. Both published on-chain so suppliers can find work in their field. Category is how a supplier filters the board; pick the closest, it does not affect scoring. Delivery region is where the goods or work are going, not where the supplier is.

Budget and stakes

Budget (USDC). The most you will pay. It is a ceiling the contract enforces: an award above it is refused however well it scores. Set it to the most you would genuinely accept, not to what you hope to pay. The unspent remainder comes back to you when you award. A budget far below the market rate produces no bids rather than cheap ones.

Bid deposit (USDC). What each supplier stakes to place a bid, returned when they reveal. It exists to make bidding cost something, so the field is people who mean it. Too low and you invite unserious bids; too high and you exclude smaller suppliers who cannot float it. Somewhere near 5–10% of the budget is a reasonable starting point. The winner's deposit is not returned. It rolls into their performance stake until the job is finished.

Your stake (% of budget). Your own money at risk alongside theirs, held until the engagement finishes. It is what makes the tender credible to a supplier who has been let down before. There is a minimum the policy enforces; above that it is a signal, and a bigger one costs you nothing if you behave.

Retention (% per milestone). Withheld from every milestone payment and released only when the final milestone is accepted. Ordinary construction and manufacturing practice: it is what makes finishing matter more to a supplier than finishing a milestone. 5–10% is typical.

Not a field, but it belongs here: the platform fee. If the deployment charges one, it is deducted from each milestone as that milestone is accepted and is borne by the supplier, so you pay the price you agreed, and they receive that much less. You cannot set it and it is not part of your budget arithmetic, but it is published on the bid page and written into your terms, because a supplier who found out after winning would have bid on a different deal. It is zero on this deployment, and nothing about it appears anywhere while that is true.

Timetable

The three preset buttons set every date and window together, spanning a planned purchase at two weeks down to an urgent one at forty-eight hours. Anything shorter has to be typed in by hand, because a tender no supplier can answer in time still takes their deposit.

Bidding closes. After this nobody can submit or change a bid. Give suppliers real time to price: a day for something off a shelf, a week or two for anything that needs quoting from a factory.

Revealing closes. On an open tender this window is dead time. Nothing is revealed, because every price was public as it arrived, but the contract still requires the deadline and scoring still waits for it, so the tender sits fully decided and unscoreable until it passes. The form offers to shorten it to a few minutes when you choose open; take the offer, because paying for a faster evaluation will not help, and nothing about the wait protects anybody.

On a sealed tender the window is the point. The rest of this applies there: Every bidder must return and reveal in this window or forfeit their deposit. Do not make it tight. An hour is fine for people watching for it; overnight is kinder and costs you nothing. The commonest cause of a forfeited deposit is a reveal window that closed while someone slept.

Award deadline. Your own deadline to decide. Let it pass and the tender closes with no award, deposits return, and everyone's time is wasted, so give yourself more than you think. This is the one that most often lapses.

Delivery per milestone. How long the supplier has from the moment each milestone opens. It is a window that restarts each time, not a final date: three milestones of 14 days is a six-week job. Set it at least as long as the slowest delivery you would accept, because the contract refuses an award to a bid quoting longer, so a short window silently makes good bids unawardable.

Suppliers quote delivery in the same units you set here, so any window you can express is one a bid can answer. Remember it is a deadline rather than a wait: a supplier can deliver the moment a milestone opens, and the window only matters if they are late.

Acceptance window. How long you have to inspect before payment releases on its own. Hours for a document, days for anything physical. For goods it must cover shipping plus inspection rather than just your review. Letting it lapse pays the supplier, which is deliberate: someone who has delivered should not be held hostage by silence.

Delivery terms, physical goods only

Leave as Not a goods tender for anything delivered as a file, and skip to milestones.

Delivery terms (incoterm). Who pays for carriage and insurance, and, the part that matters, where risk passes from supplier to you. The form states the risk point for whichever you pick. This is the single thing most often left undefined in a goods contract and the first thing argued about when a pallet arrives damaged.

Named place. The port, city or address the incoterm refers to. Required once an incoterm is set, because the term says who pays but not to where. Port Klang, Rotterdam, our Shah Alam warehouse.

Transit allowance (days). How long shipping is expected to take. It holds the acceptance clock back until goods could plausibly have arrived, so a supplier is not paid automatically while the container is still at sea.

Milestones

Milestones (% split). Any list of percentages adding to 100, between one and ten of them. Equal thirds suits services delivered in stages. 30, 70 is the trade convention for bulk goods: a deposit against production, the balance against shipping documents. 100 pays once, on completion, which is safest for you and hardest to get a manufacturer to accept.

More milestones means less money exposed at any moment, and more times you have to turn up and inspect. That is the whole trade-off.

The field adds them up as you type and shows what each one is worth at your published budget, so a split that is five per cent short (the usual way this goes wrong, by deleting a stage and forgetting the rest) says so before you sign anything rather than reverting afterwards.

Scoring rubric

Rubric weights, price / delivery / quality. How the evaluator scores, published before bidding and hashed so it cannot be adjusted once prices arrive. 50 / 30 / 20 is a sensible default for a defined purchase. Weight quality higher for an RFP where method matters.

Nothing ties the weights to what you are buying. A price-dominant rubric on a consultancy tender is permitted and is probably wrong; the form will not stop you.

What to quote

Line items. Optional. Leave empty for a single-line buy, or list item, quantity and unit so every supplier prices the same basket. You can paste straight from a spreadsheet. Worth doing for anything with more than one part, because it is what makes two quotations comparable.

Terms and conditions

Where to send quotations. Published permanently with the tender, so use an address meant to be public: tenders@ or procurement@, never a personal inbox. Suppliers send the priced quotation here; only its hash goes on-chain.

Terms and conditions. Press Generate standard terms for clauses built from the figures you entered, then edit. These restate what the escrow actually does. They are not legal advice and not a complete contract. Warranty, liability, governing law and termination are not things a form can guess, and they belong in the attached document. Once posted, the terms are hashed and bind you.

Terms document. Optional for an invited tender, where you can email the file. Required in practice for an open one, since otherwise only the people you happened to email can read the terms. It is uploaded so any supplier can download it, and hashed so they can prove their copy is the one you published.

Requirements

Everything in this section except Visibility is published, not enforced. An address has no country and no certificate, so nothing on-chain can check these. They are screened by the evaluator and flagged, which is worth having, but if you need to restrict who bids, use invited visibility.

Who may bid. The supplier's own location, as distinct from where delivery goes. Leave open unless it genuinely matters.

Required delivery (days). A bid slower than this is flagged automatically when revealed. Note this is separate from Delivery per milestone, which is the one the contract enforces.

Minimum completed jobs here. Counted from this deployment's own record, not from anything a supplier claims. Setting it above zero on a new deployment will exclude everybody.

Other requirements. One per line: ISO 9001 certification, 24-month warranty, Net 30 payment terms. The evaluator marks these unverified rather than satisfied, because nothing on-chain can confirm them. That is honest rather than useless: a supplier who ignores a stated requirement is visible in the memo.

When you submit

You will sign twice: once to permit the USDC, once to post. The budget and your stake move into escrow, the tender appears on the board, and the metadata hash is fixed. After this the scope, rubric and terms cannot be changed without every bidder seeing it.

If you get something wrong

Nothing published can be edited. The scope, category, rubric and terms are fixed by a hash when the tender opens, which is exactly what lets a supplier spend a day quoting against it. A tender whose terms could move under them would be worth nothing. So a typo in the scope or the wrong category cannot be corrected in place.

What you can do depends on whether anyone has bid yet.

Nobody has bid: cancel and repost. The Actions panel offers this while 0 bids are committed. Your budget and stake come back in full, nothing has cost anyone anything, and you post a corrected tender. This is the common case for a typo, because most mistakes are spotted in the first minutes.

Somebody has bid: it runs its course. Cancelling is refused once a sealed bid exists, because that bidder has a deposit at risk on the strength of what you published. If the mistake makes the tender unusable, the honest move is to let the award deadline pass and close it without an award, everyone who revealed gets their deposit back, and you have lost only time. Say so in the clarification round rather than leaving bidders to work it out.

Closing without an award is a transaction, not a deadline. Once the award deadline passes the tender reads as closed, but the budget and your stake are still held by the contract until somebody calls it. The Actions panel has a button; anyone may press it, because the money goes to the buyer either way and a buyer who has given up is precisely the person who will not return to press it.