How to register on eTenders, step by step

1. 1. Go to etenders.gov.ie and choose the supplier registration option. You’re registering as a supplier (a company that sells), not a buyer.
2. 2. Create your user login — email address and password. This first user becomes the administrator for your company’s account, able to add colleagues later.
3. 3. Verify your email. The platform sends a confirmation link; nothing works until you’ve clicked it, so if it doesn’t arrive, check spam before anything else.

Keep the login details somewhere your colleagues can find. A surprising number of companies discover at deadline week that the only person who knows the eTenders password left last year.

Next the platform asks about the company itself: legal name, registration and VAT details, address, size, and contact people. Two things are worth doing properly here rather than rushing.

Use the exact legal name. Your tender responses, declarations and — if you win — the contract will hang off this profile. “Murphy Facilities Management Limited” and “Murphy FM” are not the same entity to a contracting authority. Match what’s on your company registration.

Add more than one contact. Notifications, clarification messages and award correspondence go to the contacts on the account. Two named people plus a shared inbox is a sensible floor. You can add or change contacts later from the account settings, so revisit this when people move on.

CPV codes — the EU’s Common Procurement Vocabulary — are how the platform decides which tenders to tell you about. Buyers tag each notice with the codes for what they’re buying; you subscribe to the codes for what you sell; the platform emails you when they match.

1. 1. Search the CPV list for your trade — start from plain words (“cleaning”, “software”, “traffic management”) and note the codes that fit. Our CPV code finder makes this quicker than scrolling the raw list.
2. 2. Subscribe to a considered set — the codes you’d genuinely bid under, plus the near-neighbours buyers sometimes file under instead. Codes have a hierarchy: a broader parent code catches more, at the cost of more noise.
3. 3. Review after a month. If every alert is a miss, your codes are too broad; if a colleague spots a tender you never heard about, they’re too narrow. Adjust and repeat.

Be honest about the limits: CPV alerts match the code a buyer chose, not the work actually being bought, and no code set gets it exactly right. That gap is why we built a relevance-checked alert that reads each day’s notices and judges whether the work fits a business like yours — worth knowing about once your eTenders account is live.

Whether a tender reaches you by alert or by searching the current notices, the routine is the same. Open the notice and read the summary first — buyer, deadline, a description of the requirement. If it looks live for you, register your interest in the competition. This matters more than it sounds: expressing interest is what puts you on the distribution list for that tender, so clarification answers and updated documents reach you. Suppliers who just download the pack and walk away sometimes end up bidding against a version of the documents that changed weeks ago.

Then download everything — instructions to tenderers, specification, response template, pricing schedule, draft contract, appendices. Read the instructions document first, and before you sink an evening into the pack, run it through a bid / no-bid checklist: deadline, eligibility minimums, and whether the work is genuinely yours to win. Note the value too — what process a tender follows, and what paperwork it carries, shifts with contract value, which we cover in tender thresholds in Ireland.

Every competition has a messaging channel inside the platform, and it’s the only proper way to ask the buyer anything. Something ambiguous in the specification? A contradiction between two documents? An eligibility criterion you’re not sure applies to you? Submit a clarification question — before the clarifications deadline in the timetable, which closes earlier than the submission deadline.

Two habits serve you well here. First, ask early — buyers routinely publish answers to all bidders, and a question asked in week one shapes your response; one asked at the deadline helps nobody. Second, check the messages and any published Q&A before you submit: answers given to other bidders bind the competition just as much as the original pack, and they’re a free look at what the field is worried about.

1. 1. Follow the pack’s instructions exactly — the required documents, the response template, any file naming or format rules. Compliance is checked before quality is scored.
2. 2. Upload your documents to the competition’s response area. Watch file size limits, and give yourself time — uploading five documents at 3.55pm against a 4pm deadline is how good bids die.
3. 3. Complete every required field and declaration in the online workflow, not just the uploads.
4. 4. Press submit — genuinely submit, not save-as-draft — and keep the confirmation the platform gives you.

The deadline is a hard cut-off. Late submissions are rejected no matter how strong the content, so treat the day before as your real deadline and leave the final hours for checking, not uploading. For what actually goes into a scoring response — the requirements matrix, MEAT criteria, evidence — see the tender & bid writing guide and the wider eTenders supplier guide.

An eTenders account only pays if someone actually works it. The suppliers who get value from theirs run a light routine: skim the alert emails when they land and kill the misses in seconds; once a week, run a quick search of current notices in your categories to catch anything the codes missed; and for every tender you’re pursuing, check the competition’s messages before you touch the response again, in case a clarification answer changed something.

Twice a year, service the account itself. Are the contact people still right? Did the person who owned the inbox leave? Do your CPV subscriptions still match what you sell — did you add a service line last spring that has no code attached? Ten minutes of maintenance beats discovering, months later, that the tenders you wanted were arriving in a mailbox nobody reads.

Registration gets you to the start line — finding tenders was never the hard part. The hard part is the pack: the scored questions, the marking scheme, the ESPD, the pricing schedule. That’s the bit TenderBuilder does: upload the pack and it drafts a scored, submission-ready response to the buyer’s own marking scheme, grounded in your company’s facts — nothing invented. Plans start at €99/month, or €83/month billed annually — see pricing.