Solicitation

A solicitation is any formal document by which a buyer invites suppliers to compete for work — the umbrella covering requests for information, requests for quotation, requests for proposal, tenders, and prequalification calls. It defines the requirement, the terms, the evaluation rules, and the deadline; everything a supplier is judged on flows from it.

Public solicitations must be published, and their rules held to: criteria added after the fact, or applied unevenly, are the raw material of bid challenges. Private solicitations answer to no procurement law, but they are still contracts in formation — misread a condition in a major customer's RFP and it binds you just the same. The first discipline of responding is reading the entire package, annexes included: the agreement you are actually accepting rarely lives in the covering letter.

@misc{pi-2026-definitions-solicitation,
  author = {{The Procurement Institution}},
  title  = {Solicitation — definition},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://procurementinstitution.org/definitions/solicitation},
  note   = {Release 2026.10}
}