One Price for All: Why We Don't Do "Call for Pricing"

There is a habit in this trade that I have never been able to defend. A customer rings up about a boardroom table, and before anybody talks about the table, somebody works out what sort of customer they are. Big company or small. Buying once or buying often. Sounds like they know the market or sounds like they do not. The price arrives afterwards, tailored to the answer.

It is legal, it is common, and it is why office furniture prices in the UK are so hard to compare. We do not do it, and I want to be clear about what that means in practice.

One price, and it is on the page

Every price on our site is the same price for every business customer. There is no trade tier, no account pricing, no discount that appears if you sound reluctant. A sole trader buying one chair pays what a hundred-person company pays for the same chair.

That is written into our terms rather than left as a promise on a blog, because a promise you will not put in your terms is not really a promise.

Prices show excluding VAT, which is the convention for business buyers and stops the number jumping about at checkout. Delivery charges, where they apply, appear before you confirm rather than after.

Why call for pricing exists

It is worth being fair about it. There are two honest reasons a supplier hides a price. One is genuinely bespoke work, where the specification does not exist until you have described it. The other is a manufacturer contract that forbids showing a price below a certain figure online.

Neither applies to a standard desk in a standard finish. When you see call for pricing on a catalogue product, the reason is almost always the third one: they would like to know who you are first.

What it means when you buy

The practical effects are small and they add up:

• You can budget from the website on a Sunday evening without booking anybody's time.

• You can compare us against somebody else properly, because there is a number to compare.

• Nobody in your team gets a different price to the one you were quoted, which matters when the person ordering is not the person who did the research.

• There is nothing to negotiate, so there is no advantage in being the sort of person who enjoys negotiating.

The bit that costs us

This approach loses us money on some orders. When somebody buys forty desks, the industry norm is to quote high, then discount for volume so the customer feels they have won something. We just charge the price on the page, which on a big order is less than we could have got.

It also means we occasionally lose to a competitor whose headline price is lower and whose delivery charge is not. There is nothing to be done about that except to keep our own numbers honest and hope people compare properly.

What we get back is a much shorter sales process and almost no arguments. Nobody has ever rung us to ask whether they could have had it cheaper, because the answer is on the page and it was the same yesterday.

If a price is wrong

Occasionally one is. A supplier changes a cost, a decimal point moves, something gets typed in wrong. When we spot a genuine error on an order you have already placed, we contact you and tell you what the correct price is. You can take it at the corrected price or cancel for a full refund. What we will not do is quietly ship it and hope, or quietly cancel and say nothing.

You can see how all this works across the whole office desk range and the meeting and boardroom tables. Every product, every size, every finish, priced on the page. One chair or forty, it is the same number, and it will be the same number next Tuesday. If you are buying to a budget, the price bands do the sorting for you: office chairs under £250, office desks under £250, and so on up.