Answer
How do you get suppliers to confirm purchase orders without a portal?
Updated July 2026 · by the DynamoDocs team
The short answer
Send them a signed link instead of an invitation. DynamoDocs generates a link scoped to one order and one contact; the supplier opens it and confirms the order as written, proposes a different delivery date or quantity, or declines. No login, no password, no account. A confirmation changes nothing; an answer that changes the order is flagged and routed to review.
Why supplier portals go unused
The usual answer to this problem is a supplier portal, and the usual outcome is that most suppliers never sign in. Every portal asks a supplier to create an account, remember a password, and check a system that is not theirs, for the benefit of one of their customers. A supplier with two hundred customers is not going to maintain two hundred logins, so the portal covers your largest partners and the long tail keeps emailing.
A link is not a portal
This is deliberately not a portal, and the distinction is what makes it work. There is no standing login, no dashboard, and nothing for a supplier to maintain. One link answers one question about one order and then expires. Because there is nothing to adopt, there is no adoption problem: the supplier does what they were going to do anyway, which is read your email and reply, except the reply lands as structured data on the order instead of as prose someone has to re-key.
What the supplier can actually say
Three answers, on one page. Confirm the order as written. Accept it with changes, adjusting the delivery date, a line quantity, or both, with a note. Or decline, when they cannot fulfil it at all. The line grid is pre-filled with what you ordered, so proposing a short quantity is editing a number rather than composing a description of a change.
A changed order is an exception, not an acknowledgment
This is the part that earns the feature. A confirmation as written changes nothing, so the order stays where it is. An answer that changes the order, or declines it, is flagged and routed to human review, because an order your planner reads as arriving Tuesday when the supplier has said Friday is precisely the surprise that becomes a stockout. The same rule applies to a non-clean EDI 855, for the same reason.
Security, given it goes to an external party
The link is a signed token scoped to one order and one contact, with an expiry you set. By default the supplier is asked for the last four characters of the order number before the order is shown, so a forwarded email does not hand the order to whoever receives it, and procurement mail routinely lands in shared and archived inboxes. Opening the link never records anything: mail-security scanners fetch every URL in an inbound message before a human sees it, so a link that acted on being opened would have suppliers' own scanners answering their orders.
Related questions
Does DynamoDocs email the supplier for us?
No. It generates the link and hands it to you; a person or an integration sends it from your own mail. DynamoDocs has no outbound mail sender, and a button claiming to notify your supplier would be untrue.
What if the supplier answers twice, or forwards the link?
The first answer is recorded and a second open shows that answer rather than an error or a second record. The token is scoped to one order, so a forwarded link cannot reach anything else.
Is this a replacement for EDI 855 acknowledgments?
No, it is the option for suppliers who will never do EDI. Where a partner exchanges EDI, the 855 remains the right channel and is stronger evidence; this covers the long tail that a portal or an EDI programme never reaches.
Do we have to turn it on?
No. It is off by default, because enabling it publishes a route that answers without a session. It is a deliberate decision rather than something that happens to you on upgrade.
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