Buyer quickstart
Create a free account, receive supplier data, browse your catalogue, and invite suppliers to submit product data.
This guide takes a buyer — a retailer, distributor, or restaurant chain — from nothing to browsing real supplier product data. Set aside about 20 minutes, most of it waiting for two emails.
You do not need an invitation or a credit card. You start on the free plan.
What you will end up with
- An organisation on PIE, with you as its administrator
- Colleagues invited alongside you
- A catalogue showing exactly what your suppliers have shared with you
- A way to ask a supplier who is not yet on PIE to send you their data
1. Create your account
Go to the PIE home page and choose Start free. Fill in your organisation name, a short web address, your country, and your own name and work email.
Choose Buyer as the account type. Buyers consume product data; producers create it.
2. Confirm your email address
Click the link in the email that arrives. Nothing is created until you do — if it has not appeared in five minutes, check spam and try again with the same address.
3. Choose your password
The link shows your organisation name and the role you are about to get (administrator). Set a password and continue. You land in the buyer portal, signed in.
4. Wait for approval
New organisations are reviewed by a person first. A banner tells you your organisation is under review; you can look around but not change anything yet. A second email confirms approval.
5. Invite your team
Open Settings and find the team section. Invite colleagues with a role:
| Role | Can do |
|---|---|
| Administrator | Manage people, onboarding requests, quality profiles and your own AI settings |
| Subscriber | Read product data your suppliers have shared — nothing else |
See Roles & permissions.
6. Understand why your catalogue is empty
A new buyer organisation sees nothing, and that is correct.
You see a supplier's products only after that supplier grants your organisation access to them. Until then, as far as your account is concerned, their data does not exist.
This is enforced in the database rather than by hiding rows in the screen. There is no URL to change and no API call that returns more than you were granted — which is exactly the guarantee your suppliers rely on when deciding to share with you.
There are two ways to fill it:
- A supplier already on PIE grants you access. Ask them; on their side it is one screen (see the Producer quickstart, step 10). Refresh and their products appear.
- A supplier not yet on PIE sends you data. That is step 8.
7. Browse and search
Open your Catalogue. Search results are scoped to your grants and to your languages — you never see a product you were not given, and you see it in the language you work in.
See the Products guide for how localisation works.
8. Ask a supplier to send you their data
This is the part buyers use most.
As an administrator, create an onboarding request. You get a link to send to your supplier. They fill in their product data without creating an account — no signup, no password, nothing for them to manage.
You can pin a quality profile to the request, which sets what "complete enough" means: required fields, allergens, whatever you need. Submissions that fall short are held rather than silently accepted.
When you approve a submission, the products land in your catalogue as real, granted products.
You can also connect your own AI provider keys so the field-matching step runs on your account. See the Onboarding guide and the AI guide.
9. Connect your own systems
- Create an API key from API Keys. Start with a sandbox key — it is read-only, so you cannot break anything while you experiment
- Read Authentication, then Pagination
- Subscribe to Webhooks to be told when supplier data changes, instead of polling
- Browse every endpoint in the API Reference
When you outgrow the free plan
The free plan does not expire and does not ask for a card. Buyer plans are measured mainly by how many suppliers you are connected to and how many onboarding requests you can run at once.
You will see a warning in the app before anything is blocked. To move up, open Settings → Billing.
- Prices exclude VAT, which is added at checkout where it applies. EU businesses with a valid VAT number are not charged VAT
- Paying yearly costs ten months
Cancelling returns you to the free plan and deletes nothing.
For larger buyer arrangements, talk to us — those are quoted rather than self-serve.
See Plans, entitlements & billing and the current limits.
Next steps
- How the platform works: architecture and grants & multi-tenancy
- Notifications and organisation administration