Save Money on Office Supplies
2011-11-14 09:39:34
Buying office supplies for your business can be a time consuming and expensive exercise, however it doesn’t have to be this way and you can make substantial savings in both time and money by following some simple buying practices. One of the Office Allsorts team has put together their top 5 tips to help you buy your office supplies more effectively.
Negotiate. The average stationery company (ourselves EXCLUDED) will be looking to make a gross profit margin in excess of 35%. There’s always room for negotiation. Don’t bother if you’re just buying the odd box of files, but, if you buy regularly or are buying in bulk, get on the phone and negotiate. If you’re buying on-line, don’t think you can’t negotiate, ...you can. The online stationers might not like it as they prefer online only sales as it keeps overheads down but it can and should be done.
Special Offers. Genuine offers are out there. Be they BOGOF or buy 2 get 3, or buy 2 and receive a box of biscuits. On our site there are ‘Special Offer’ sections. These contain ‘end of line’ products with savings of up to 80% or manufacturer funded promotional lines. If you’ve the time seek these out first and with a little effort, you WILL get something for nothing with no ‘strings’ attached, a rarity these days.
Bulk Buy. By this I don’t mean you need to take in stationery by the pallet. But if you’re buying copier paper, buy it by the box rather than the ream. A typical ream of copier paper costs £3.69, 5 reams therefore costs £18.45 BUT, buy it by the box and you get 5 reams for £14.99 – A 19% saving!! Most good office supplies companies should offer multi-buy savings. We, for example offer tiered savings of 3%, 5% and 7.5% if you buy in multiples of 3, 5 or 10. Most stationery items won’t have a ‘use by’ date so are not going to perish so if you’ve got the space, save by buying in bulk.
Buy Monthly. Office Supplies companies don’t like small orders, it costs them money in logistics. If it costs them money, you can bet that they’ll pass it on to you, the customer, somewhere down the line. But, conversely, if you can talk to your office supplies company and work towards reducing the frequency of orders and increasing the size then they OUGHT to pass their savings on. We recently worked with a customer and reduced their overall pricing by 12% as they moved to monthly orders across 5 regional offices.
Price Benchmark the right products. Most customers can tell us to the penny what they pay for a ream of paper and use this as a price benchmark. Why?? A ream of paper costs £3.50, save 10% and you’re saving £0.35p a ream, use 10 reams a month and the monthly saving is £3.50. Save 10 % on the ink it takes to print those 10 reams or the files used to store those 10 reams and you could save yourself A LOT more. If you’re price benchmarking pick 10 of your most often used items.
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