GeM product upload: catalogue listing and brand approval, explained

To upload a product on GeM, log in to your seller account, open the catalogue section of the dashboard, choose Add New Offering, select the exact category your product belongs to, get the brand approved (or select unbranded where the category allows it), fill in every mandatory attribute, and upload compliant images. Once the listing clears approval, it’s live — and only then can you actually sell or bid in that category.

That’s the flow in one paragraph. The reason this post is longer than one paragraph is that each of those steps has a rejection trap in it, and one of them — brand approval — has a limited number of attempts. Here’s how the whole thing works, and where sellers I deal with actually get stuck.

A standing caveat: GeM redesigns its catalogue screens regularly. The sequence below is stable; the exact button labels move around. Verify on the portal.

Why can’t I bid without a catalogue?

Because on GeM, your catalogue is your eligibility for product bids. When a buyer publishes a bid in a category, the portal matches participating sellers through their offerings in that category. No live catalogue in the category, no participation. Registration — which I’ve covered step by step in the GeM seller registration guide — only creates the account. The catalogue is what turns the account into a business.

This is the single most common misunderstanding among new sellers: they register, see bids they want, and discover at the deadline that they can’t respond because they never listed anything. The catalogue isn’t a storefront you get around to later. Build it the week you register.

What is the upload flow, step by step?

The skeleton, in order:

1. Find the exact category. Not a similar one, not a broader one — the most precise category and sub-category that matches your product. GeM’s category tree is deep, and the search inside the catalogue section is your friend. This choice drives everything downstream: the attributes you must fill, the quadrant rules, and which bids you can serve.
2. Sort the brand question. Select your approved brand, apply for brand approval if it’s not yet approved in this category, or choose unbranded where the category permits it. Details in the next section, because this is where the attempt limit lives.
3. Fill the mandatory attributes. Every category has a defined attribute set — dimensions, material, certification, warranty, whatever the category demands. Every mandatory field, filled honestly. “Not applicable” on a field that clearly applies is a rejection waiting to happen.
4. Upload the images. Original photos of the actual product on a clean white background. No watermarks, no logos stamped on the image, no downloaded stock photos. Multiple angles help. Keep files within the size limit the upload screen states — guides commonly cite a few hundred KB in JPG or PNG, but take the live limit from the screen, not from a blog.
5. Set price and stock, and submit. Your listed price matters later too — bids and reverse auctions reference your catalogue, so don’t park a fantasy number there.

None of this is intellectually hard. It’s clerical, and it punishes impatience. The sellers who get through in one pass are the ones who opened the category’s attribute list first, gathered the data and photos, and only then started the form.

How does brand approval work — and what’s this three-attempt limit?

If you sell branded goods, the brand must be approved on GeM for the category before your listing can go live. You apply through the catalogue flow: select “brand new” (as in, new to GeM), submit the brand name and supporting documents — a registered trademark certificate where the category demands one, or the documents the category’s brand policy lists — and wait for verification.

Here’s the part that deserves respect: the limit sellers consistently run into is three brand approval attempts per category. Reject all three and you can’t simply apply a fourth time — you’re into a brand revival request through the GeM helpdesk, with documents, which is slower and less certain. I’d hedge the exact number, because GeM revises policy without much ceremony — verify on the portal before you rely on it — but the principle is fixed: attempts are rationed.

So treat the first application as the only one. Trademark certificate matching the brand name exactly as you’re claiming it, correct trademark class for the category, documents legible and current. A rejected attempt because you uploaded the wrong class certificate costs you a third of your chances.

If you’re an OEM, get your brand approved once and it serves your resellers too. If you’re a reseller, the brand question is really an authorisation question — which brings us to quadrants.

What do the Q1–Q4 quadrants actually mean?

GeM classifies product categories into quadrants that control who may create catalogues in them. The core four:

Quadrant	Who can upload a catalogue	Where resellers stand
Q1	OEMs only (top-rated segment)	Resellers can’t participate
Q2	OEMs only	Resellers sell by pairing with the OEM’s catalogue, using OEM authorisation codes
Q3	OEMs and authorised resellers	Reseller uploads a catalogue request; OEM approves or rejects
Q4	Any seller	Open — upload directly

(You’ll see references to Q5 and Q6 as well in the current system; the four above are the ones that decide most sellers’ fates, so check your specific category’s rules on the portal.)

The practical consequences:

• Find your category’s quadrant before you plan anything. A reseller building a business plan around a Q1 category is planning something the portal won’t allow.
• In Q2, you don’t create a listing at all — the OEM does, and issues authorisation codes that let you sell against their catalogue.
• In Q3 and Q4, reseller catalogue requests route to the OEM, who is expected to approve or reject within 72 hours, with reasons recorded. GeM enforces this with a real stick: an OEM who sits on pending requests gets their own product uploads held until they clear the queue. If your request is rejected unfairly, you can represent against it.

The whole quadrant system is GeM’s answer to a real problem — random traders listing branded goods they had no right to sell. It adds friction, but the friction is survivable if you line up the OEM relationship first. How to actually obtain that authorisation, and what a manufacturer’s authorisation form looks like, is its own topic — I’ve covered it in OEM authorization and MAF for tenders.

Why do listings get rejected?

After watching sellers go through this repeatedly, the rejections cluster into four causes, all self-inflicted and all avoidable:

• Wrong or broad category. Filing a product under a roughly-right category instead of the precise one. GeM wants exact placement, and the verification catches mismatches between the category, the attributes, and the product shown in the images.
• Attribute gaps. A mandatory field skipped, guessed, or waved away with “not applicable”. The attribute set is the category’s specification sheet — the buyer’s bids will filter on these fields, so GeM has every reason to police them.
• Image violations. Watermarks, brand logos stamped onto photos, low resolution, lifestyle shots instead of clean product images, or photos that don’t match the product described. The image rules are mechanical, which means they’re mechanically enforced.
• Brand and document mismatches. Claiming a brand without approval, an authorisation that doesn’t cover the category, or specs in the listing that contradict the uploaded documents.

Notice what’s not on the list: your product’s quality, your price, your company’s standing. Catalogue rejection is paperwork rejection. Which is good news — paperwork you control.

How long does approval realistically take?

Honest answer: it varies, and GeM doesn’t publish a service-level commitment for every step.

What I can say from observed cases: OEM action on reseller requests is bounded at 72 hours by policy, and the hold-their-uploads enforcement means most OEMs do respond. Brand approvals and category verification typically resolve in a few days to a couple of weeks. If something has sat longer than two weeks with no movement, raise a ticket through the seller support channel rather than waiting — silence on GeM is never a queue position you can see.

Budget the whole journey — registration to first live listing — at two to four weeks if your documents are in order, longer if a brand approval or OEM authorisation is in the path. Plan backwards from the bids you want to chase.

The short version

Pick the exact category, check its quadrant, line up brand approval or OEM authorisation before you start the form, fill every attribute, shoot clean white-background photos of the real product, and submit once, properly. The three-attempt brand limit is the portal telling you, in its own way, that this is not a process to iterate through casually.

Once the catalogue is live, you’ve completed the setup phase. The selling phase — finding bids, pricing them, winning them — is a different skill, and I’ve laid it out in how to sell on GeM. And if you’d rather the right bids found you instead — matched to your categories and states, on your phone the day they publish — that’s what we built TrackTender to do.