How ranking works

Published under Art. 5 of Regulation (EU) 2019/1150 (the P2B Regulation).

Paid placement does not exist here

No payment, of any kind, affects ranking or matching on this platform. There is no advertising, no promoted listing, no sponsored result and no paid priority in buying-request matching. There is nothing to buy, so nobody has bought it. If that ever changes, this page will say so before it takes effect.

We also receive no payment for a completed trade and take no commission, so we have no financial interest in which supplier a buyer chooses.

Which suppliers receive a buying request

When a buying request is published, suppliers are selected as follows.

Eligibility — applied first, as a filter

A company is considered only if all of these are true:

• its verification tier is documents checked or audited — a registered-only company is not matched;
• it has at least one published, unexpired listing;
• it has not opted out of buying-request emails;
• it is not the company that posted the request.

Ranking — applied to those that remain

Eligible suppliers are ranked by how well the tags on their published listings overlap the tags on the buying request. The main parameters, in order of importance:

1. Coverage (dominant). What proportion of the request’s tags this supplier’s listings cover. A supplier matching every tag ranks above one matching half.
2. Focus (secondary, capped). Where two suppliers cover the request equally, a supplier whose catalogue is close to the request ranks above one whose catalogue is very much broader. This is capped on purpose: a large distributor that genuinely stocks everything asked for is ranked below a specialist, but never below a supplier covering less of the request.
3. Company identifier (tie-break only). Where scores are identical, ordering is by internal identifier so results are stable. This carries no editorial meaning and no advantage — it exists so the same request does not notify different suppliers on two runs.

At most 20 suppliers are notified for any one request. A supplier receives at most 5 buying-request emails in any rolling 7-day period, so a supplier who has already reached that limit is not emailed even if they rank highly. Both limits exist to keep the emails worth reading.

A supplier with no tag overlap at all is never notified. We would rather a request reach fewer suppliers than reach irrelevant ones.

How a supplier can influence its ranking

There is nothing to pay for, so the levers are all editorial:

• Tag listings accurately, and reuse existing tags. Matching is on tags, so a listing tagged with the words buyers actually use is found and one tagged idiosyncratically is not. Existing tags are suggested when you post for this reason.
• Publish more of your genuine range. Your matchable tags are the union of tags across your published listings, so a narrow catalogue matches narrowly.
• Reach documents-checked tier. Below it, no buying requests are sent at all.
• Keep listings live. Expired listings do not contribute.

Ordering of search results

When you search on Biovern, each result is scored and the highest score is shown first. The score is the sum of three parts, and there is nothing else in it:

• Text relevance. How closely your words match the listing. A match in the title counts for more than a match in the description, because the title is what the supplier chose to call the product; a description mentions many things the product is not.
• Tag match: +0.5. A fixed bonus when your search matches one of the tags the supplier attached to the listing.
• Verification: +0.3 for an audited supplier, +0.1 for documents checked. A fixed bonus by tier. Registered suppliers get no bonus and no penalty.

The verification bonus is added to the relevance score, not multiplied by it. That is the whole difference between a boost and a thumb on the scale: it can lift a listing above others that are already comparably relevant, but it cannot lift an irrelevant listing above a relevant one. In the current catalogue a title match scores roughly 1.4 to 1.8, so the largest verification bonus is worth substantially less than actually matching what you typed.

Search covers published, unexpired listings and the suppliers that have at least one. It does not filter by verification tier: an unverified supplier's listings are findable on this site, they simply do not receive the bonus above.

Ordering of listing index pages

The offer index and the supplier index are ordered alphabetically — offers by title, suppliers by company name. No quality assessment, no recency, no commercial relationship, and no verification bonus applies there. This section will be updated in the same change as any code that alters it.

Which listings appear in search engines

Not every page is offered to search engines, and the rule is a quality threshold rather than a commercial one. A listing must be published, unexpired, carry at least two photographs, and include the minimum-order, price-band, packaging and Incoterms information a buyer needs. A supplier profile must additionally have reached documents-checked tier. Anything below those thresholds remains fully usable on the site but is marked not-indexable, because publishing thin pages would degrade the marketplace for everyone in it.

Questions or disagreement

If you believe your listings are being ranked or matched wrongly, write to info@biovern.eu. You are entitled to an explanation, and to complain — see complaints.