Pricing for a Wholesale Distributor for Plumbing Parts

We are a Wholesale Distributor for Plumbing Repair Parts & Maintenance Products.

We are looking to start an E-commerce site and are facing the issue of how we develop a pricing structure that can be viewed by the public.  Currently, we set pricing by the customer and no one has the same type of pricing. We have roughly 10,000 Item Numbers that we stock and are not sure where to begin or the best way to methodically start the process.

If you need more information let us know. Any tips that anyone has, will be most helpful!

  • Look into price levels (customer) and price codes (inventory). With the price levels you can set up different margins by customer/group of customers. For example: wholesale and retail.
  • Jacqui There are a couple of companies that can do custom E-Commerce sites and take care of the pricing structure. It is all a matter of how much your budget it. Wish you could have been at the Sage Summit, there were a couple of companies you could have talked with.
  • If you price by the customer it must take a lot of time to re-price inventory if you need to increase prices. Save some time and develop a pricing matrix. Think of having a spreadsheet with customer "types" along the top (maybe, A, B, C, D, etc. or "R" for retail and "D" for distributor, "W" for web customers ... you get the idea). Then product "types" along the side based on how you price products. The pricing groups don't necessarily need to correspond to your product lines but could be similar. Alternatively, you can also think of having your products list down the side and the customer types along the top. Generally when people price products, you have different prices based on the type of customer they are.