Common questions

Everything practices and vendors ask us most.

29 questions on how Oasis works — access, buying, selling, orders, shipping, payments, returns and your data. If yours is not here, a person answers directly.

About Oasis

  • What is Oasis?

    A marketplace for medical and dental supplies. Approved vendors list what they stock, equivalent listings are grouped onto one product page, and every offer is ranked by what it actually costs to receive. A practice compares, fills one cart across vendors and checks out once.

  • Does Oasis sell the products itself?

    No. Oasis is the marketplace, not the seller of record. Products are sold and shipped by independent approved vendors; Oasis runs the comparison, takes the payment, and handles order issues and refunds.

  • Who is Oasis for?

    Two sides of the same order: dental and medical practices buying supplies, and the vendors who sell to them. Both join by application, and both are reviewed by a person before their account opens.

Marketplace Access

  • Why can't I see prices without an account?

    Vendor pricing on Oasis is commercially negotiated rather than list price. Publishing it openly would publish every vendor's position to every competitor, so pricing opens to verified practices instead. Registering takes a few minutes and costs nothing.

  • What do I need to register my practice?

    Your legal entity name and EIN, your practice address, and the license or permit documentation your state requires. Documents upload straight into private storage — they are never published, and only a reviewer who needs to open one can.

  • How long does approval take?

    Usually within two business days. A person reads every application; there is no automated pre-screen that approves you instantly and no sales call in between.

  • What happens if my application is rejected?

    You are told why, in writing. A rejection always carries a reason — the platform will not record one without it — so you know whether it was a document that needs re-uploading or something that cannot be resolved. You can apply again once it is fixed.

Practices

  • How are competing offers ranked?

    By total by default — unit price plus shipping. You can re-rank by unit price alone or by delivery speed, and whichever offer leads on the axis you chose is flagged where it sits, so you can always see who wins on what.

  • What does “price + shipping” actually mean?

    What the order costs to receive, not what the item costs to buy: unit price plus that vendor's shipping. A vendor who is cheapest per unit and charges delivery regularly loses to one who is slightly dearer and ships free — which is exactly the comparison most practices never have time to run.

  • Why do I see one product instead of five separate listings?

    Equivalent listings from different vendors are grouped onto a single product page, with every vendor's offer underneath it. A search result is therefore a thing you can buy rather than a thing somebody typed into a catalog five times.

  • Two vendors list the same product with different pack sizes. Which is right?

    Both versions are kept and shown on the offer that made them, and the disagreement is queued for an operator to adjudicate. Oasis never silently merges them — a silent merge is how somebody ends up buying a box of 100 when they wanted a box of 1,000.

  • Do I pay less when I buy more?

    Where a vendor offers them, yes. Vendors set their own qty breaks, and the price that applies to your quantity is the one you see.

Vendors

  • How does a vendor join?

    By application, reviewed the same way a practice is. You submit your legal entity, EIN and license documentation, a person reads it, and only then can your listings go live. That review is what the word “approved” means everywhere else on this site.

  • What does it cost to list?

    Listing is free. Oasis earns a commission only when you sell, calculated at the moment the order is placed against the rate in force then — a later rate change never re-prices an order you have already fulfilled.

  • Can I see what other vendors charge?

    No. Your portal shows your own rows and nothing else — never another vendor's position on a product you both list. The isolation is enforced at the database, not merely hidden in the interface.

  • What happens to my listings if I go out of stock?

    An out-of-stock listing disappears from every buying surface so nobody can order what you cannot ship, and stays fully visible and editable to you. Set a low-stock threshold per listing and you are warned before a practice finds out for you.

  • How and when am I paid?

    Commission is deducted at the transaction and payouts follow on a settled schedule you can audit line by line in your portal, with each payout traceable back to the orders behind it.

Ordering

  • Can I buy from several vendors in one order?

    That is the point of the cart. Add the best offer from each vendor into one basket and check out once — there is no separate cart per vendor and no second login.

  • What if an offer sells out while it is in my cart?

    Price, stock and vendor eligibility are all revalidated before payment is taken. If something has moved you are told before you are charged, never after. Out-of-stock offers also disappear from buying surfaces entirely rather than sitting there greyed out.

  • Can I cancel an order?

    Before a shipment leaves the vendor, contact us and we will handle it with the vendor. Once it has shipped it becomes a return rather than a cancellation — either way it goes through Oasis, not through the vendor.

Shipping

  • Why did one order arrive in several shipments?

    Because several vendors filled it. Your order splits into a shipment per vendor, each shipping on its own timeline from its own warehouse. It is one payment and one order reference to you; the division happens behind the scenes.

  • How do I track an order?

    Your practice portal lists every order under its reference, with each shipment's own status and carrier tracking as the vendor ships it. A partially shipped order shows exactly which shipment is still coming.

Payments

  • What does Oasis cost a practice?

    Nothing. No subscription, no per-order fee, no membership tier. Oasis takes a commission from the vendor on what they sell, which is also why there is no incentive to rank one vendor above another for anything except what the order costs you.

  • Who do I pay — Oasis or the vendor?

    Oasis, once, for the whole order. You are never redirected to a vendor's site to pay, however many vendors the order covers; Oasis passes each vendor its share after taking its commission.

Returns & Refunds

  • Something arrived damaged, wrong or short. Who do I contact?

    Oasis. You are never handed off to the vendor to argue it out. Operators review the order, the shipment and the transaction together and resolve it, including a full or partial refund where that is the answer.

  • How do refunds work?

    Full or partial, issued against the original transaction. A refund is recorded as its own entry rather than as an edit to what you were charged, so your history always shows what actually happened rather than a corrected version of it.

Security & Privacy

  • Is my card stored by Oasis?

    No. Card details are tokenized by the payment processor; Oasis holds a token and never the number. The whole marketplace runs over TLS, and you are never redirected to a vendor's site to pay.

  • Who can see my practice's information?

    Your own users, and Oasis operators who need it to run a review or work a case on an order. No vendor sees your account, and no vendor sees what you bought from another one — tenant isolation is enforced in the database itself, so an application bug cannot leak across it.

  • Where is my license documentation kept?

    In private storage, outside the public web. It is reachable only through short-lived signed links issued to a reviewer, and an uploaded document can never be replaced by an operator — the evidence a decision rested on stays as it was filed.