GSA Blog

GSA’s Federal Marketplace (FMP) Strategy Fall 2022 Update

Summer’s high heat didn’t slow down the Federal Acquisition Service! We’ve been working hard behind the scenes, and have plenty of improvements across the projects that make up GSA’s Federal Marketplace (FMP) Strategy. We’re taking a look back at the past six months of updates related to the FMP Digital Experience (DX) Initiative. These are at the heart of improving the buying and selling experience for all of our stakeholders – customers, vendors, and acquisition professionals – because we're committed to making it easier to do business with GSA.

WHAT’S NEW? 

At the top of the list is buy.gsa.gov, the new Federal Marketplace Strategy Buyer Experience and single platform that will eventually house all of FAS’ online market research tools. 

Buy.gsa.gov was built using Human Centered Design to resolve known pain points in the buying process. Over the past year, we have been conducting ongoing usability testing to ensure it’s a site that meets the needs of federal buyers. The insights we continue to gather allow us to innovate faster, fix what’s not working in a more timely fashion, and make improvements that respond to user needs.

Buy.gsa.gov lets our customers complete several tasks in one location, similar to how you might currently shop. One Department of State customer said about buy.gsa.gov’s customer research “[I] get everything I need in one place. I don’t have to go to 7 different sites to get my acquisitions done.” This ease-of-use is exactly what makes the platform such a user-friendly experience.

We’re also seeing Pricing Central become one of the site’s most popular features. Pricing Central is buy.gsa.gov’s one-stop location for contract and task order pricing information. Since its release in April, traffic to Pricing Central has increased 125% month-to-month, with more than 10,000 new users utilizing the feature. In fact, it’s the highest-utilized feature on the site!  Over 50,000 searches are performed each month, and users tell us their favorite feature is the ability to quickly search and export prices by labor categories (including subcategories). 

The re-launch of the modernized Interact on buy.gsa.gov helps industry and government securely communicate and build successful partnerships with one another. Home to many active communities focusing on federal acquisition, traffic on Interact increased 67% in June (17K more users on the site than the month before!), with 1500 new accounts being created that month alone. Interact is another great example of how we use customer feedback to improve and modify features. Soon after its debut, Industry users reported issues registering their new Interact accounts to the NCSC Help Desk. This feedback helped us quickly identify the problem, and within 24 hours we had implemented modifications that solved the issue.   

COMING SOON

Innovation continues to be front-and-center for buy.gsa.gov. In the next year, our Pricing Tool will be updated to include additional data sets and your “Market Research As A Service,” or MRAS, journey will begin at buy.gsa.gov. And of course, we’ll continue to make refinements to several of our other tools. 

Throughout the process of building, launching, and data analysis, the buy.gsa.gov team has listened to their customers, applied best practices, and used human centered design to create a great platform. We’re constantly making improvements and evolving the site so visit today and see how we’ve made it easier to do business with GSA. If you want to provide feedback or notice a bug, please contact fasdigitalsupport@gsa.gov.