r/procurement: rules, karma requirements and posting culture

Q: How much karma do you need to post in r/procurement?

The rules ask for at least 10 comment karma and an account older than 3 days. Meeting both does not guarantee an instant post. About 17% of posts in our sample were held by AutoModerator for review.

Q: Can I promote my software or service in r/procurement?

Not in a normal post. The rules ban posts advertising a business or service. There is a monthly stickied spotlight thread for vendors, AI products and procurement software where pitching is expected, and a Question from a vendor flair for honest research questions.

Q: What kind of posts work in r/procurement?

Text posts that ask peers how they handle something, and career questions with real background. About 84% of posts are text, around 43% of titles are questions, and the typical post is about 100 words and gets five comments.

Q: Is r/procurement good for career advice?

Yes. Career guidance is the second most used flair, and threads about moving into procurement, salary gaps, certifications and where to go after procurement are among the most commented. State your experience, industry and location to get useful replies.

A working buyers' forum for sourcing, supplier headaches and procurement careers. Helpful to peers, wary of vendors, who get one monthly thread.

Procurement · Open on Reddit

Members: 32k
New posts a day: 5.1
Comments on a typical post: 5
New posts removed: 30%

The short answer

r/procurement asks for an account older than 3 days and at least 10 comment karma. Even above that, expect a wait: about 17% of posts in our sample were held by AutoModerator and another 7% or so were removed by moderators. Nearly everything is a text post asking how other procurement people handle something, or asking for career advice. Advertising a business is banned in posts, and vendors are pointed to a monthly stickied spotlight thread.

Who posts here

Knowledge levelIntermediate

Posts use RFQ, RFP, PO, ERP, CIPS and CPSM without explaining them, and the best answers come from people with a decade or more in the job. Career changers and new graduates are answered kindly and often. A question from someone outside the function gets a different reception: commenters will ask whether you actually work in procurement before they answer.

Buyers, sourcing analysts and category managers, mostly in manufacturing, construction, tech and government.
Procurement managers with ten or more years in, who answer more than they ask.
Career changers from admin, accounting, operations and engineering asking how to get in.
People studying for CIPS, CPSM and similar certifications.
Software founders and vendors doing research, some open about it and some not.

Karma and account requirements

What it takes to get a post through in r/procurement.

Karma	At least 10 comment karma. Post karma is not mentioned.Mods' wording: “Have, at minimum, 10 comment karma”
Account age	Older than 3 days.Mods' wording: “Be older than 3 days”
Topic	The post has to be about procurement. That is the whole rule, with no further description.Mods' wording: “Posts must relate to a procurement topic.”
Advertising	Not allowed in posts. Vendor pitches go in the monthly stickied spotlight thread.Mods' wording: “No posts advertising a business or service.”
Post flair	Optional. About half of posts carry one. Community Question is the most common at roughly a quarter of posts, then Career guidance. There is a Question from a vendor flair.
Post type	Text. About 84% of posts that stayed up are text and about 13% are links.

What you can post

Post type	Subreddit setting	Share of recent posts
Text	Allowed	84%
Link	Allowed	13%
Image	Not stated	2%
Video	Not stated	<1%
Poll	Not stated	<1%

Post flairs in use

Community Question 26%
Career guidance 12%
Procurement Systems (e.g., Ariba/Oracle) 3%
RANT! :snoo_angry: 3%
Certifications (e.g., CIPS/CPSM) 1%
Question from a vendor 1%
Fun :upvote: <1%
Direct Procurement <1%
Training <1%
Indirect Procurement <1%

What happens to a new post

Where the most recent posts ended up. Sample size: 400.

Stayed up69%
Removed by Reddit's filters6%
Held by AutoModerator17%
Removed by moderators7%
Deleted by the author1%

Reddit counts a removal by the subreddit's own AutoModerator rules as a moderator removal, so that share is not all human. Held by AutoModerator means the post is waiting in the mod queue.

What happened when we posted here

We have posted here ourselves. This is how our own posts and comments fared.

Stayed up: 100%
Removed by Reddit's filters: 0%
Removed by moderators: 0%
Period: November 2025 to April 2026

The rules, in the mods' words

1
Posts must relate to a procurement topic.
2
Absolutely no discriminating, racism, sexism, doxxing, personal attacks, spamming or trolling.
3
No posts advertising a business or service.
4
Do not reach out to the moderators directly.
If you have a question relating to r/procurement, please reach out to the Mod team and not the individual moderators privately.
5
Karma and Account Requirements
* Be older than 3 days * Have, at minimum, 10 comment karma This will help keep spam and unsolicited BS to a minimum.

These are the rules as archived in January 2025. Rules change. Check the sidebar before you post.

The culture

r/procurement is around 32,000 people who buy things for a living, and it has grown fast: it had under 8,000 members in 2023. It is a small, steady room, about five posts a day, and the typical post gets five comments. Replies are short and practical, written by people describing how their own shop does it.

Two kinds of post make up most of the feed. The first is the peer question: do you run everything through an RFQ, who should lead a supplier negotiation, how do you get a business unit to write its own requirements. The second is career talk: how to get in from admin or accounting, whether a certification is worth it, what salaries look like, and where people go when they are burnt out. Rants are a recognised genre with their own flair, and a short one about a request that sat for two weeks and then became urgent was among the most upvoted posts in the sample.

The fault line is vendors and AI. Procurement software is a crowded market and the subreddit is an obvious place to look for buyers, so the mods run a monthly spotlight thread for vendors and AI products and a weekly roundtable for everyone else. Regulars say outright that they like the vendor thread because it keeps the main feed from turning into a sales floor. Posts that describe a problem in suspiciously product-shaped terms get questioned in the comments.

What lands

A how do you do it question about a specific process, short enough to answer from experience: RFQ habits, vendor onboarding, who owns negotiations.
Career questions with your years of experience, industry, current title and country stated.
A real supplier problem with the details, such as a molder shipping defective lots and blaming the drawing, or a late export control clause on a small machining job.
A short, relatable rant about last minute requests or being undervalued by other functions.
Sharing a personal milestone, like finally passing a certification module after failing it once.

What gets removed or ignored

Job ads and work offers. A hiring post and an opportunity for work post were both removed by moderators.
Link posts that sell a service, such as a marketplace pitch dressed as a tip for buyers.
Reposting the same question. One question appears six times among the mod removals, under different flairs.
Certification help posts with one or two word titles and no detail.
Posts from accounts under the threshold. About 17% of the sample was held by AutoModerator before a moderator looked at it.

The unwritten rules

Say whether you are a buyer or a seller. People check, and a question that reads as outside looking in gets called out before it gets answered.
Give the spend level, the category and whether it is goods or services. Otherwise the answer is that it depends.
Comments are plain text. Only about 1% carry a link, so a link to your own product stands out. The vendors who get away with it disclose where they work in the same sentence.
If your post is held, wait. Posting it again and again is what gets it removed by a moderator.
The rules tell you not to message individual moderators. Use modmail to reach the team.

Self-promotion

The rule is one line: no posts advertising a business or service. The stated outlet is the monthly stickied spotlight thread, where software developers, AI founders, consultants and service providers are invited to pitch, look for beta testers or ask for advice. In practice a founder can also post a research question in the main feed if they disclose that the project is theirs and hold the link back, and vendor employees do answer questions in comments with a disclosure attached. Our own record here is small and mostly comments, and none of it was removed, which fits that pattern: useful answers are left alone, pitches in posts are not.

How people write here

Typical post length: 102 words
Typical title length: 9 words
Titles phrased as a question: 43%
Typical comment length: 36 words
Comments that include a link: 1%
Posts that carry a flair: 48%

When people post

0:00 UTC, 18
1:00 UTC, 12
2:00 UTC, 12
3:00 UTC, 11
4:00 UTC, 7
5:00 UTC, 5
6:00 UTC, 7
7:00 UTC, 16
8:00 UTC, 23
9:00 UTC, 8
10:00 UTC, 15
11:00 UTC, 12
12:00 UTC, 17
13:00 UTC, 24
14:00 UTC, 35
15:00 UTC, 22
16:00 UTC, 24
17:00 UTC, 20
18:00 UTC, 24
19:00 UTC, 26
20:00 UTC, 16
21:00 UTC, 18
22:00 UTC, 19
23:00 UTC, 9

New posts by hour of day, UTC.

The regulars

The accounts that showed up most in our sample. Worth reading before you post: they set the tone, and they are usually the first to reply.

Most active posters

u/roger_the_virus11 posts
u/orlandom12894 posts
u/HyphenWR4 posts
u/ProtectionBrief40784 posts
u/desiccantot3 posts

Most active commenters

u/SyncronTeam4 comments
u/Tiny-Discipline34084 comments
u/Upstairs-Resort-73754 comments
u/Prepped-n-Ready4 comments
u/SojuTofu4 comments

Top keywords

The words and phrases that show up far more often here than in other communities, from recent posts in r/procurement.

procurement 173 posts
supplier 71 posts
suppliers 46 posts
sourcing 42 posts
vendor 47 posts
supply chain 31 posts
management 54 posts
supplier management 14 posts
stickied thread 14 posts
cips 14 posts
buyer 35 posts
procurement professionals 12 posts
procurement experience 12 posts
role 45 posts
wins venting 11 posts
weekly procurement 11 posts
vibes positive 11 posts
venting lessons 11 posts
venting dealing 11 posts
unlock difficult-to-achieve 11 posts
tough negotiations 11 posts
thursday grab 11 posts
thread automatically 11 posts
tactics worked 11 posts
steam dive 11 posts
savings tough 11 posts
roundtable wins 11 posts
professional growth 11 posts
procurement roundtable 11 posts
procurement peers 11 posts
procurement entirely 11 posts
process wins 11 posts
milestone troubleshoot 11 posts
major milestone 11 posts
major contract 11 posts
industry framework 11 posts
impossibly bad 11 posts
general venting 11 posts
exam general 11 posts
entirely wading 11 posts

Recurring topics: procurement, ai, supplier, contracts, software, sourcing, vendor, career, rfp, advice.

Posts that did well

Where did you go after procurement/strategic sourcing?42 upvotes · 27 comments
Trump signs memorandum to identify and remove Canadian products from U.S. federal procurement41 upvotes · 7 comments · Fun :upvote:
Small rant.33 upvotes · 24 comments · RANT! :snoo_angry:
Do you feel like procurement is under appreciated? We fight so many unseen fires22 upvotes · 16 comments
What Does a realistic procurement career path Look Like for a 36 yo with no corporate experience?22 upvotes · 11 comments
UK Procurement salaries – is there really this much of a gap between industry and consulting?20 upvotes · 28 comments · Community Question
Procurement process16 upvotes · 4 comments · Community Question
Need to understand how y’all do it15 upvotes · 22 comments

Growth

201225
201360
2014131
2015211
2016345
2017544
2018944
20191.6k
20237.7k
202414k
202522k
202632k

r/SupplyChainLogistics
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r/developersPak
r/helpdesk
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r/ITdept
r/bim
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Common questions

How much karma do you need to post in r/procurement?