Clever marketing and loss-leader pricing has always made it extremely difficult to work out the best value supplier for office supplies, printer ink, paper, furniture, catering and cleaning products. You know the stuff - all of the 20,000 items in that big catalogue that sits on the shelf in most offices. 
But with typical spend as much as £500 per head each year, this is a budget that is worth some attention if you intend to keep a tight lid on costs.
This is easier said than done, because there are several problems to overcome:

1. It's hard to compare suppliers - it's hard to tell which supplier really has the best deal for your business, because there are so many different products in the catalogue.

2. You can't check every order - order values are usually quite low and order frequency is high (most offices place at least one small order per week). 

3. You can't check every price - you can't efficiently phone around for quotes, every time you want to place a £50 stationery order for several items. 


The traditional solution? Look around and pick a trusted supplier and delegate the whole ordering process to your office manager or receptionist - then you can get on with running the business.
The result? Many suppliers make hay - having won your trust with a few high profile loss leader prices (eg on copier paper), you have now handed over the keys to the stationery cupboard to a junior member of staff to place the orders. And because office products don't have a fixed price you have no real way of knowing whether you are overpaying or not. 


Beware of more clever tricks. Having won your account, some suppliers are very clever at getting your staff under their spell. A free gift for a junior buyer can be a deal breaker. It could even make them buy supplies they don't need. 

And the solution is....This is one of those "why has no one done this before?" moments.

A rapidly emerging star of the office supplies and stationery sector is www.mintprice.com. 

Mintprice is not a stationery supplier - it is a website that uses price comparison technology to find you the "best price for your basket", every time you place an order. They only use quality suppliers, so you get the same products you've always ordered and the usual overnight delivery. 
According to Nigel Hudson, mintprice.com Managing Director, "By using mintprice.com, sustainable savings of 25% and more are quite usual, and this is because our technology changes both buyer and supplier behaviour in the following ways:


1. Suppliers will be competing for every order, so they rely on loss leaders or special promotions to hook you and then sell you other products at inflated prices.
2. Mintprice does not offer free gifts to your staff to get them to buy things you don't need.
3. You get full reports showing what was bought, by which member of staff.
4. You can take control by setting ‘company standard products', so staff do not order ‘premium brand' products when a budget version will do the job just as well.

 

"And Mintprice.com is making quite an impact, winning over 2,500 customers in under two years with 120 new customers joining every month.

"But we understand that this is new technology and that some people have a healthy scepticism for things that may seem too good to be true", continues Nigel, "so we created our ‘take the mintprice.com challenge' campaign for people to test us out and see just how much they could save by using our unique site. We are so confident that we can save businesses at least 25% on like-for-like supplies that we pledge to send a £50 voucher to anyone where we cannot make this savings target". 

 

The details are all at www.mintprice.com/challenge.

 

Nigel Hudson, Managing Director, Mintprice.com