The One Percent Most Distributors Never Look At
In four decades of working with distributors, I've sat in on more pricing conversations than I can count — and almost none of them started with the pricing sheet itself. They start with volume, with competitors, with what a customer complained about last quarter. Pricing is usually the last thing anyone revisits, which is strange, because it's the one lever that touches every sale you make.
Why a small number moves so much
Most of what it costs you to fulfill an order is already fixed by the time you quote a price — freight's booked, the part's in the warehouse, the invoice is about to go out. That's exactly why a small pricing correction doesn't just add a little margin, it adds almost all of it straight to profit. I've seen distributors move pricing accuracy by a few percentage points and watch it show up as a much larger jump in what actually hits the bottom line.
Most pricing structures I've reviewed weren't wrong on purpose. They were just never revisited.
Where the money actually goes missing
It's rarely one big mistake. It's a discount tier set up years ago for a customer who's since changed how they buy. It's a product line priced against a competitor who's no longer in the market. It's a loyal account that gets the same discount they got when they were a fraction of the size they are today. None of it looks wrong on any single invoice — it only becomes visible when you look at the whole picture at once, which is exactly the part most teams don't have time to do manually.
The Takeaway
Pricing isn't a set-it-and-forget-it decision — it's the one part of the business that compounds quietly, for better or worse, every single day you don't look at it.
This is exactly the kind of blind spot AI-driven pricing tools like Bubo.price are built to catch — not to replace judgment, but to surface what years of accumulated exceptions have hidden from view.