Linnworks ships with one retail price and one purchase price per SKU. That's it. If you sell B2B — and most Linnworks operators we talk to do — that single retail price is wildly insufficient. Different trade accounts get different prices, prices change with volume, exports get a separate ladder, and the rep at the counter has none of it in front of them. Here's how to fix it cleanly.
The problem in one sentence
You need per-customer pricing, but Linnworks gives you per-channel pricing. The gap is where spreadsheet sprawl lives.
What we see when we look at trade businesses on Linnworks
- A "trade price list" Excel updated quarterly, emailed around, immediately stale.
- Sales reps memorising twelve account-specific discounts and getting them wrong half the time.
- Account-specific PDFs sitting in Dropbox, customer-by-customer.
- Three different prices for the same SKU across three different conversations, depending on who answered the phone.
- An invoicing team manually correcting the price on every order before it goes out.
Every one of those is a margin leak. Every one is also a recipe for the rep undercutting a price that a director promised was a floor.
The shape of the fix
Three concepts, none of them complicated:
- Named price tiers. Define a small set — say Trade, Wholesale, Enterprise, RRP. Every SKU has a price for every tier.
- Customers assigned to tiers. Each trade account belongs to exactly one tier. New customers default to Trade unless you tell us otherwise.
- One formula per tier. Trade = cost × 1.65 with attractive rounding to .95. Wholesale = RRP × 0.65 rounded to .49. Set once, applied to thousands of SKUs at once.
That's the whole model. Once it's in place, "what should I quote this customer for SKU XYZ?" becomes a one-line answer rather than a forty-minute negotiation.
How we do it at Green & Home Ltd
We built B2B Price Tiers for ourselves first, then made it available as a Linnworks app for anyone else with the same problem. Here's what it actually does:
- Spreadsheet-style grid with inline editing and bulk maths. Edit one cell, or change a markup across thousands of SKUs at once.
- Formula engine. Cost-up or RRP-down per tier, with rounding that lands prices on .95/.99/.49 endings automatically.
- Linnworks sync, both ways. Pull your catalogue down from Linnworks, push tier prices back as native extended properties. No third-party fields to babysit.
- Customer-to-tier assignment — either in B2B Price Tiers, or directly from the order screen in Trade Order POS when a customer rings up.
- Per-tier minimum order value. If a trade account on Tier B has a £150 MOQ and the order in the cart is £120, the POS prompts the rep before submitting.
- CSV import/export for anyone who needs to round-trip via Excel.
Where it really pays off: the trade counter
The hardest part of pricing isn't deciding the price — it's getting the right one onto the order at the moment of the sale. With B2B Price Tiers + Trade Order POS, the rep doesn't have to know the tier. They pick the customer; the cart fills with the customer's tier prices automatically. The cart shows the tier in case someone wants to override it. The customer leaves the counter, the order lands in Linnworks open orders with the right number of pence on every line, the invoicing team has nothing to fix.
One of our trade reps timed himself before and after: a 12-line order used to take 8 minutes including price lookups; now it takes 90 seconds.
What you lose if you keep doing it in spreadsheets
- Margin. A 4% pricing error on a £200,000 turnover wholesale operation is £8,000 a year. Most spreadsheet shops are running 2-5% errors.
- Speed. The rep on the phone is googling a PDF while the customer waits.
- Trust. Customers learn quickly which rep gives the best price and only call them.
- Audit. When pricing lives in spreadsheets, the question "why did we charge that customer that price?" has no answer.
How to get started without committing
If you want to see whether the model fits your business, the cheapest test is to spend half an hour mapping your top 50 customers into 3-4 tier buckets on a napkin. If a real pattern emerges — and it almost always does — you'll know the engine is worth wiring up.
If it does, B2B Price Tiers runs a 14-day free trial with every feature unlocked. Build your tiers, sync your catalogue, see if it sticks before you pay.
Want a worked example for your specific catalogue size and customer mix? Email hello@mcp-g.com with your number of SKUs and rough tier shape, and we'll send you a back-of-envelope sizing for the margin you'd recover.