How to Simplify Your Purchase Price Changes in 2 Simple Steps

Distributors of Office and Cleaning supplies face the challenge of managing the constant flow of supplier purchase price changes. It’s this frequency which can lead to smaller margins and smaller profits if you don’t adjust your sell price to compensate.

With Trade and Revenue Management software, distributors can expand their inventories into new categories while improving margins, boosting customer satisfaction, and handle supplier purchase price changes easily. We have two practical ways to accommodate supplier purchase price changes, we think your pricing specialist will love them.

1.  Make sure you have hyper flexibility for your pricing

The operating systems used by distributors of Office and Cleaning supplies don’t support increasing prices on schedule for each customer. They have worked around this by maintaining customer pricing outside of the system, increasing the risk of pricing errors and making supplier purchase price changes difficult to apply.

With advanced pricing functionality within Trade and Revenue Management software, distributors can establish hierarchies by price group, product line, and product. Equally as important, distributors can convert the purchase price change into managed costs and into new selling prices to maintain profit margins within their ERP when suppliers make purchase price changes.    

How does this benefit distributors? With hyper flexibility for pricing, distributors can do more with more. Distributors can increase their product offering without the corresponding increase in administration to support them. At the same, they can look to move their products online to make purchasing easier for customers and to compete with online retailers like Amazon.  

Hint: With the ability to expand your product offering, your customers will streamline their purchasing and you will capture additional business from your competitors.  

2.  Have real-time pricing and effective date functionality

With the frequency at which suppliers send through purchase price changes, distributors of Office and Cleaning supplies need to make a pricing change live as quickly as possible or risk sales being made without of date pricing. Trade and Revenue Management software can not only update pricing in an instant but with the inclusion of effective dates, distributors can control when prices are set in the future.

For example, if your supplier increases the cost of a specific product by $0.10 every quarter, you can add these known increases for the whole year to a Base List Price agreement and the price will go up automatically every quarter. This means you’re able to account for any price change notification agreements with customers.  

Hint: With real-time pricing, you’re able to react in an instant to competitor pricing changes giving you the ability to compete against large online retailers like Amazon.