Partner Article

Dealing with Suppliers

As a business owner, it’s important that your attention is never steered too far away from sourcing the best supplier, whether they supply the best quality products, or offer the lowest prices. Be savvy and don’t make easy, short term decisions; in reality you’ll need to constantly evaluate supplier offerings. Here are my key learnings from dealing with suppliers:

Learning 1: Know Your Market

First of all, it’s important to know your target market. Do they want the most premium products, or are they more interested in getting the best deals? Whilst the quality of the products you’re offering is of utmost importance, you have to make sure that people will be willing to pay for it. We’ve found that our customers keep returning because we offer premium quality compatible and remanufactured cartridges at the best possible price. We don’t aim to be the cheapest but we do constantly scour the market, trying to find the best quality for the lowest prices available.

Learning 2: Consider The Extras

Sometimes there are other advantages to suppliers than just the initial price point. We changed our delivery supplier recently, and in addition to providing a carbon neutral service, we received savings on shipping costs. On top of that, we’re saving approximately £700 a month with improved efficiency in the warehouse, due to tighter IT integration with the new supplier.

Learning 3: Loyalty

We’ve actually found in our sector, that there’s very little reward for loyalty. Many suppliers won’t budge from listed prices, and won’t be prepared to offer discounts to keep their customers ordering more. Our efficient warehouse system means that we’re constantly turning over stock every three to four weeks, giving us the flexibility to keep looking at new suppliers. We put out monthly tenders to secure the best prices on the next orders. What’s often crucial is timing; ordering at the end of the month when suppliers are desperate to meet their targets, and also timing your order to take advantage of strong currency rates.

We recommend you keep your fingers on the pulse of the market, become familiar with how timings affect what suppliers can offer. For instance, by closely monitoring our markets, we’re able to pick up the best prices available and can pass these savings onto customers, maintaining our everyday low prices.

Learning 4: Analyse the Trends

Once you’ve purchased stock from a supplier, you must instil a method of quality control. Suppliers’ stock will all be different to each other, but as the customer facing provider, it must meet your own minimum requirements. As we’re constantly changing suppliers, looking for the best deals, we have to ensure that the quality of the stock coming in passes our own stringent quality tests, and exceeds our customers’ expectations.

We find that the best way to do this is to keep analysing returns trends. As part of our quality tests we dictate that should 1% of a particular supplier’s stock be returned, we would then place that supplier’s stock into “quarantine” and take it off our website. The stock and supplier would be queried about quality, and if we’re not convinced that quality would improve, we’d immediate look to switch to ensure customers get the best quality for the best price.

To summarise, it’s important that suppliers are dealt with great care. It takes time to nurture fruitful relationships with suppliers. However, the bottom line is that pricing and quality of the stock that suppliers offer you is more important. Being trumped by a competitor on price, or becoming known for supplying unreliable products will hurt your brand. Always have your customers at the forefront of your mind and decide how suppliers improve your offering.

Sean Blanks is the Marketing Director of www.cartridgesave.co.uk the UK’s largest dedicated printer cartridge company. By taking a systematic trial and improvement approach, Sean and the company’s Managing Director have created a double-award-winning Sunday Times Fast Track 100 e-retailer which manages 30,000 orders a month; ranks above all its competitors on independent shopper surveys on sites including Google, Pricegrabber and Shopzilla; and is the UK’s fastest growing printer supplies retailer in terms of sales.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Sean Blanks .