Scores of GSA Schedule contractors have gotten “Dear Contractor” letters requiring companies to lower prices because a GSA Advantage comparison found that their prices were “too high” based on an Advantage search. GSA’s OS 3 management team is urging OS 3 contractors to put all items on Advantage because so many office supply sales are going through that portal.

It seems that the rumors of Advantage’s death – spoken of openly just 12-18 months ago – were premature. Unfortunately for GSA and its contractors, precisely because so many in and out of the agency assumed Advantage would be replaced, few companies bothered to keep Advantage listings current. Few CO’s monitored it. Even before that, few firms had their entire Schedule product list available on the system. Schedule buyers have never really purchased that way. That means the price comparisons GSA relied upon to tell people their prices were “too high” were almost certainly based on inaccurate, incomplete, and outdated information.

The directive from OS 3 is curious because it suggests that buyers aren’t using OS 3 contracts as much as OS 2. Remember that there was a lapse in contract coverage between these two Strategic Sourcing vehicles. Buyers went many other places, including Advantage, to get supplies and may not have gone back to OS 3 when it was finally operational. What this means for the future of OS 3 is an open, but not uninteresting, question.

It’s also not like Advantage operations are fully funded inside GSA. Advantage has to compete for funds like every other program and, today, that means higher priority programs like the “prices paid” tool take priority. Advantage funding hasn’t been at the top of the GSA IT ladder since the Clinton Administration.

Advantage was, and to some extent is, still neglected. It absolutely has inaccurate, out of date information on it. Unless the agency plans to devote resources to it and monitor it better for accuracy, they shouldn’t really be relying on Advantage for anything other than an example of what a first generation e-commerce site looked like.