You asked five suppliers for a price. You got back a PDF, a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp photo of a handwritten table, an email that says "around $2.10", and silence. Congratulations, you are now doing procurement.
The problem is rarely that one quote is "the cheapest." The problem is that the quotes are not describing the same thing. Here is a simple way to make them comparable before you pick a winner.
1. Rebuild every quote on one sheet
Make one row per supplier and fix the columns before you start filling them in:
- Unit price at the quantity you will actually order
- MOQ (minimum order quantity), and the price at that MOQ
- Tooling, mold, plate or setup fees, and who owns the tooling
- Sample cost and sample lead time
- Production lead time
- Incoterm (EXW, FOB, DDP...) and the named place
- Packaging included or not (inner, master carton, labels)
- Payment terms (deposit and balance)
- Quote validity date
If a cell is blank, that is information, not a zero. Write "not stated" and ask.
2. Normalize to one landed number
A FOB price and a DDP price cannot be compared directly. Pick one point, usually "delivered to my warehouse," and add the missing pieces to each quote: freight, insurance, duties, customs brokerage, and inland delivery. Rough estimates are fine at this stage, as long as you use the same assumptions for everyone.
Then spread the one-time costs (tooling, setup, samples) over your first order. A supplier with a lower unit price and a large mold fee can easily be more expensive on order number one.
3. Check the spec, not just the price
Two quotes for "a 6x4x2 mailer box" can mean different board grades, print methods and finishes. Send every supplier the same written spec, and ask them to confirm it line by line in their quote. A quote that silently changes the material is not a cheaper quote, it is a different product.
4. Send one clarification round
Before deciding, send each supplier a short list of the gaps on your sheet: "Your quote does not state the Incoterm or the tooling owner. Can you confirm?" How fast and how precisely they answer tells you a lot about how the production run will go.
5. Decide with more than one column
Price matters, but so do lead time, MOQ fit, payment terms and how clearly they communicated. It is fine to pick the second-cheapest supplier because they answered every question and the cheapest one answered none.
The short version
Same spec in, same columns out, one landed number, one clarification round. Most "which supplier is cheaper?" debates disappear once the quotes are actually comparable.
This kind of quote chasing and side-by-side comparison is what we built HireDov to handle: it finds suppliers, requests and follows up on quotes, and lays them out for comparison. More at https://hiredov.com
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