Marketplaces make buying easy, but they don’t manage spend. This article breaks down the difference between shopping tools and a true procurement strategy — and why the distinction matters for non-acute financial and operational performance.
Across outpatient care, marketplaces and vendor portals have become increasingly common ways for staff to order supplies. They make purchasing quick and convenient — and for many organizations, they feel like a modern solution to supply ordering.
But convenience and control are not the same thing.
And when it comes to non-labor spend, the difference matters.
While marketplaces solve for shopping, they do not solve for spend management.
A procurement strategy requires visibility, consistency, and alignment — and marketplaces simply weren’t built to provide that.
The Rise of Marketplaces in Non-Acute Care
Marketplaces have become popular because they are easy to use.
Teams can:
- Search for products
- Compare options
- Order quickly
- Track shipments
- Manage basic purchasing activity
This convenience is valuable — especially for busy clinical teams who want to minimize time spent ordering supplies. And as consumer expectations shift, digital marketplaces feel familiar and intuitive.
Marketplaces were built to help teams buy quickly — not to help organizations manage spending across multiple sites.
Where Marketplaces Fall Short
Marketplaces help teams make individual purchases — but they lack the structure needed to enforce a consistent procurement strategy. Most do not offer critical capabilities like:
1. Formulary Enforcement
A marketplace allows staff to choose from a wide set of options.
A formulary narrows choices down to what is clinically appropriate and financially responsible.
Without formulary enforcement, variation increases — and so do costs.
2. System-Level Visibility
Marketplace dashboards typically show activity at the individual user or site level.
What leaders need is:
- Cross-site visibility
- Consolidated reporting
- Spend analysis by category, supplier, or contract
- Early identification of waste or leakage
Marketplaces are not designed to offer this level of insight.
3. Off-Contract Purchasing Controls
Because marketplaces support open-choice shopping, they naturally increase off-contract spend.
Nothing prevents a user from picking something more expensive or substituting an alternative without approval.
This is a hidden — but significant — source of overspend.
4. Integration With Inventory
Most outpatient organizations lack a real-time view of what they already have on the shelf.
Marketplaces do not solve this.
Without integrated inventory management:
- Over-ordering happens
- Stockouts remain common
- Waste increases
- Teams operate reactively instead of proactively
5. Validation and Matching Workflows
Purchasing is only one part of the financial lifecycle.
Marketplaces rarely integrate with:
- Invoice matching
- Exceptions handling
- Payment workflows
- Month-end close
- Budget control processes
This forces AP and operations teams into manual workarounds.
6. Standardized Workflows Across Sites
Each site ordering independently through a marketplace leads to variation in:
- Vendors
- Pricing
- Quantities
- Products
- Approvals
Marketplaces amplify this variation — they don’t reduce it.
Procurement Is a Strategy, Not a Shopping Tool
A procurement strategy requires more than giving teams a place to buy supplies.
It requires a framework that ensures the organization can:
- Buy the right item
- At the right price
- From the right source
- At the right quantity
- Through the right workflow
- With visibility and control across all sites
Marketplaces don’t do that.
Procurement strategy does.
What a True Procurement Strategy Includes
A modern procurement strategy in non-acute care should include:
1. Formulary Management
Guiding teams toward preferred, clinically appropriate, and cost-effective supplies.
2. Standardized Workflows
Ensuring every site follows the same steps from requisition to receipt.
3. Integrated Inventory Visibility
Reducing waste, over-ordering, and stockouts.
4. Automated Matching & Payables
Improving accuracy and reducing AP workload.
5. Real-Time Spend Insights Across Sites
Helping leaders make decisions based on actual spend, not assumptions.
6. Controls That Make Best Practice the Default
Ensuring compliance without relying on manual enforcement.
The Impact of Choosing Strategy Over Shopping
Organizations that move from marketplace-only purchasing to a unified procurement strategy consistently see:
- Less variation
- Fewer off-contract purchases
- Lower supply chain and AP workload
- Improved order accuracy
- Better month-end close
- 5–10% recovery in non-labor spend
Convenience is valuable.
But convenience without control is costly.
The most effective outpatient organizations are learning to pair user-friendly tools with the structure needed to manage spending at scale — creating a blend of clarity, control, and operational consistency.