Can You Buy Business Tradelines?

Not in the same way that you can buy authorized user tradelines for personal credit. What people do instead is buy a shelf corporation. This is where you buy an existing aged company that’s been “sitting on the shelf” to tap into their credit lines. In theory, this gives you a higher business age and access to existing credit lines. But again, there is no guarantee this will work. Creditors have gotten wise to this scheme, and while not illegal, utilizing this trick could be considered fraud. The totally legal and ethical way to buy a business tradeline is to open vendor tradelines and use secured business credit cards and loans. A few of these types of tradelines can quickly build your business credit.

How Much Do Business Tradelines Build Your Business Credit?

If you make your payments on time and stay consistent with it, you could achieve pretty good business credit scores within 6 months. Top-tier scores are not out of the question at all. Business credit cards and vendor accounts that report to the business bureaus work particularly well. If you pay these types of accounts on time, keep your balance low, and qualify for a high credit limit, a single account will significantly impact the building of your business credit. High balances or late payments on a business tradeline will hurt your business credit. Having installment loans report to your business credit is important as well. Credit mix is a factor that many lenders look at when assessing your business credit reports.

Business Tradelines That Report: Which Ones You Need

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As a business owner, business tradelines are critical to getting good financing. Trade credit and other credit tradelines help build your business credit history and business credit scores.

We’ll outline the type of business tradelines you need to build your business credit and how to get them.

Business Tradelines:

What Are Business Tradelines?
Business Tradelines List
Is Buying Business Tradelines Legal?
What Should You Do Instead?
How Many Tradelines Does a Business Need?

What Are Business Tradelines?

Business tradelines can be any tradeline that appears on your business credit reports. There are two main categories: financial tradelines and vendor tradelines. Financial tradeline examples include loans and credit cards. Vendor tradelines include net 30 accounts that you have with vendors and suppliers.

Business tradelines can consist of:

Business credit cards
Business loans
Business lines of credit
Equipment leases
Supplier credit (products & business services)

Sometimes they report payments to your business credit reports, and sometimes they report to your personal credit reports, and sometimes they report to both. You need to verify which they will report to before you apply for the financing.

A business tradeline reports information, including the account opening date, amount owed, payment history, credit limit, etc. But perhaps the most important aspect of business credit is the payments.

Business tradeline payments include a history of on-time and late payments. The different business credit bureaus score this information a little differently. For example, the Equifax Business score and Dun & Bradstreet’s PAYDEX score vary in how they weight payments.

Regardless, paying on-time or even early is the key element with all of them.

Business Tradelines List

Each of these are essentially business tradelines for sale at a very good price! They are each designed to build your business credit with multiple business credit bureaus. You can also check out our Startup Business Credit Cards with No Credit article for more information if you have little to no business credit.

1. Nav

Nav is an excellent resource for viewing and tracking your business credit scores and reports. Their free account option gives you limited access to your business credit reports and scores. Just go through their sign-up flow and you’ll see the option for a free account.

But did you know they also provide a way for you to build your business credit?

Nav Prime gives you full access to your business credit scores and reports for Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, and Equifax. It also reports your monthly subscription payments to those same credit bureaus as a vendor tradeline. You can monitor your credit and build it at the same time!

Nav will never report negative information to the business credit bureaus, in case you end up paying your subscription late.

On top of that, Nav Prime comes with a charge card that reports payment activity to the business credit bureaus.

The Nav Prime Card is a financial tradeline, and the monthly payment is a vendor tradeline. So Nav Prime gives you access to two business tradelines for $49.99 per month. (You can cancel at anytime.) Also read our full Nav Review if you’d like to know more.

Try Nav

2. CreditStrong Business Credit Builder Loan

CreditStrong is well known for the credit builder loans they provide to individuals who are trying to build personal credit. But CreditStrong also offers loan options for building business credit.

These business credit builder loans work much like their personal ones. There is no hard inquiry and once approved, the loan funds will be locked away in a savings account until the loan is paid off.

CreditStrong loan amounts vary between $2,500 to $25,000, depending on how much you want to build your business credit.

Currently, a CreditStrong business credit builder account will