After an extended bid period and a short-lived protest, the General Services Administration (GSA) has re-released the request for proposals for an e-commerce platform with some significant changes.
However, vendors that didn’t bid on the original proposal won’t get another chance this time around.
The government buyers at GSA want federal employees to be able to purchase standard goods through a digital platform, similar to e-commerce platforms like Amazon. For the last few years, the agency has been working on a solicitation for just such a platform and released an RFP in October for “online e-marketplace platforms [that] feature multiple suppliers offering the same product and will allow buyers to decide which supplier/product combination meets their needs.”
The first instance of this platform will be a three-year, multiple-award pilot to test the marketplace idea. Once up and running, agencies will be able to purchase products directly through the portal for any transactions under the micropurchase threshold of $10,000.
After bids were submitted in mid-November, GSA received a protest of the solicitation, prompting the agency to pull it back and rework the RFP. The agency reissued the solicitation on Jan. 8, with revised bids due Jan. 15.
The revised solicitation includes several changes. The most important is the insertion of language in two places requiring bidders to provide a full, working solution rather than one developed in conjunction with GSA.
Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2020/01/gsa-reissues-e-commerce-platform-solicitation-significant-changes/162374/
