Three Customer Types, One Margin Headache
Holt Supply is a family-owned business grounded in three areas: plumbing wholesale; heating and cooling wholesale; and bath, kitchen, and lighting showrooms, with showrooms in Champaign, Bloomington, and Galesburg, Illinois. Owner Jean Holt set out to grow the showroom side of the business and develop a website that provided transparent, upfront pricing to retail customers.
Offering different prices to different customers made the administrative dashboard of Holt Supply’s pricing system very intricate. The company stays at or near Internet Minimum Advertised Price (IMAP) for consumers while reserving the right to sell to plumbers, builders, and designers at lower levels.
Before the new system, salespeople had to calculate the right price by setting profit margins for every item on every quote. The process was tedious and led to occasions where errors were inadvertently made due to confusion in multipliers, mark-ups, and divisors.
