Bad Seed Cider

The office supplies market is a crowded space. There are many competitors from which both small and large businesses can choose. The options range from small stores to large national office supply super store chains.

The large chain stores have been able to exert pricing pressures on many of the smaller stores because they do a much higher volume of sales and are able to leverage national sales quantities when negotiating prices with their suppliers. On the other hand, they have higher overhead costs due to their high profile locations and higher marketing and advertising costs. Furthermore, the national chains are highly focused on items with either very high profit margins or items that sell in very high volumes.

Those retailers that routinely need specialty products, like a certain size thermal paper roll for an automated gas pump, for example, may often find that the big office supply chain stores either don’t carry that item or are temporarily out of stock because it doesn’t sell in very high volumes, or that if they do have the particular thermal paper rolls that the small business owner needs then the price is inflated to make up for the lower volumes.

Sometimes, a small business owner can do better at a smaller office supply store. By talking with the manager and telling them your monthly volume needs for the specialty item, the smaller office supply store can often be persuaded to carry the item in sufficient quantity to meet their needs. However, the small supplier does not have nationwide purchasing power to lower their costs, so their price may be just as high as the inflated costs of the office superstores.

Another option is to buy from an online specialist. Like the national chains, an online supplier has a nationwide customer base that helps them maintain high sales volumes and achieve lower costs from their suppliers. As an online merchant, they have substantially lower overhead costs. They don’t need to maintain a physical storefront with all the real estate, fixture and labor costs that go with it. A small warehouse space is really all that’s needed. Marketing costs are often much lower than the bigger national chains as well.

Since the online specialist focuses on a fairly narrow range of products, commercial thermal papers, for example, they know that they need to make sure that they always have an available inventory of each item to avoid the risk of losing customers. They also tend to have a broader selection of the specific items within their specialized category.

If your business uses specialty or niche items in your daily activities, consider searching for an online specialty supplier for both superior availability and lower prices.