Step one · we don't ask you to fill out a form.
Every trade supplier who's tried to sell to you has asked you to fill in a portal — company details, VAT number, buyer contact, five drop-down menus of what you buy. That's their CRM, not your quote. We'd rather have a CSV, a PDF of an invoice, or three lines of your last order pasted into a reply. Anything with SKUs and quantities on it. Everything else we figure out from that.
Step two · line-item, not headline.
We come back with a spreadsheet that shows your current price next to ours, on the same SKU, with the same pack size, at the same volume band. No conversions, no bundle-adjacent substitutions. If your supplier charges you £3.20 for a box of black ballpoints and we charge £2.85, that's the line. If you're on a special contract and their price is already below ours, we say so on that line too. About one line in five we can't beat, and we'd rather tell you than let you find out on invoice one.
Step three · where we're transparent about markup.
On categories where our own trade cost is public — copier paper is the obvious one, print toner is the other — we tell you our markup as a percentage on the quote. Copier paper we run at 14%. Toner we run at 22% because return-and-replace is a real cost. Filing is variable per line. Everything else is priced against wholesale, which we don't break out. Nobody in this industry publishes their margins by category, and that's partly because a category-by-category read on margins is how buyers argue for discounts on the wrong categories. So we tell you the two where the math is stable and let the rest sit.
Step four · the switching cost we cover.
First thirty days on a switched account, we cover the delivery surcharge if you need something outside a standard route (a Saturday delivery, a late window, an out-of-catalogue item on rush). That's our operational answer to the friction of moving supplier — the first month is when the switching hurts, and we should be the ones eating it, not you.
What the end of the quote reads like.
"Bottom line: on your last quarter's volume, moving to us saves £780/quarter across the twenty-two lines where we undercut. Three lines we can't beat — kept those in the comparison so you have full picture. Delivery covered for the first thirty days. Reply to open the trade account; we approve applications same working day."
That's it. No portal, no six-week sales process. If the number works for you, it works. If it doesn't, you've got a benchmark for your current supplier which is worth something on its own.