Ask ten wholesalers how often they review their prices and you will get two honest answers: "when a supplier puts theirs up" and "not as often as we should". Both are revealing. The first is reactive — margin is defended only when the threat is loud. The second is guilt — everyone knows drift is eating them quietly between the loud moments. So how often should you review wholesale prices? The useful answer is not a single number; it is a two-layer system of triggers and cadence, plus a checklist that makes each review short enough that you actually do it.
Layer one: cost-shock triggers (act within days)
Some events should trigger a reprice immediately, regardless of when you last reviewed:
- A supplier increase on a meaningful category. The letter says 6% from the first of the month; your trade prices need to answer it before the new-cost stock hits the shelf, not after. Every week of delay is a week of selling at old margins on new costs.
- Currency moves, if you import. A few points on the exchange rate is a supplier increase in disguise — it just arrives without a letter.
- Carriage and input jumps. Pallet rates, packaging, energy on anything you process. These creep into landed cost whether or not the product price changed.
- A competitor repricing visibly. Not a reason to follow automatically — but a reason to look this week, not next quarter.
The discipline for trigger events is speed and containment: reprice the affected categories properly, resist the temptation to "do everything while we are in there" (that is what the calendar review is for), and get it live.
Layer two: the calendar review (quarterly is the sweet spot)
Triggers catch the shocks; they do not catch the drift. Costs that crept 1% here and there, overrides that quietly became permanent, rounding that stopped making sense — none of these ever announces itself. That is what a scheduled review is for, and for most wholesale businesses quarterly is the right rhythm. Annual is too slow — in a year of even mild inflation, a January price file is visibly wrong by October. Monthly is too heavy for a full review and breeds fatigue; customers also tolerate a quarterly adjustment far better than a monthly nickel-and-dime. Quarterly, with trigger events handled as they land, keeps the file honest without making pricing a part-time job.
What to actually check: the quarterly checklist
A review is only as good as its checklist. Four items cover most of the value:
- Margin by tier. For each price tier, compare current prices against current costs — not the costs you set the prices from. Anywhere the achieved margin has slid below your floor for that tier, the cost moved and the price did not. This is the single highest-value check on the list.
- Drifted overrides. Pull the customers and lines selling at prices that do not match their assigned tier. Some are legitimate deals; many are one-off concessions from months ago that quietly became the default. Each one is a small, permanent discount nobody signed off. Rebase the legitimate ones into the right tier; expire the rest.
- Rounding and price endings. After a few percentage adjustments, prices mutate into calculator output — £13.47, £9.02. Tidy them back to your endings (.99, .95, .49 — whatever your convention). Odd endings look like errors to customers and invite haggling.
- The ladder itself. Check the gaps between tiers still make sense: is the best tier still earning its depth in volume? Has retail moved such that your top trade tier is now barely distinguishable from it? Structural questions, quarterly, before they become strategic problems.
From spreadsheet week to a 20-minute job
Here is the uncomfortable truth about why reviews get skipped: on a spreadsheet, that checklist is days of work. Export everything, VLOOKUP costs against prices, hunt overrides by eye, retype hundreds of cells, re-import, pray nothing was fat-fingered. Businesses do not skip pricing reviews because they are lazy; they skip them because their tooling prices each review at a week of someone's time. The fix is structural, and it is the same one we keep coming back to: prices defined as formulas from cost or RRP, organised in named tiers. Then the quarterly review inverts — instead of recalculating every price, you check the inputs (are costs current?), the rules (are the formulas still right?), and the exceptions (which overrides have drifted?). Update costs, let the maths cascade, eyeball the exceptions, done. That is a 20-minute job, and a 20-minute job actually happens every quarter.
This is precisely what B2B Price Tiers, our wholesale pricing engine for Linnworks, is built for — and it is coming very soon. Unlimited named tiers with a formula engine (cost-up or RRP-down), attractive rounding to .99/.95/.49 built into the rules so check three takes care of itself, a spreadsheet-style grid with inline editing and bulk maths for the exceptions, CSV import for supplier cost files, and two-way sync that stores tier prices in Linnworks as native extended properties. Per-tier minimum order values keep the deepest prices tied to the volumes that justify them. If your ladder needs designing before it needs tooling, our piece on wholesale price list formulas is the place to start.
Put it in the diary before you need it
Two actions this week, whatever tools you run today. First, book four recurring quarterly slots in the calendar with the checklist above pasted into the invite — a review that is not scheduled is a review that will not happen. Second, write down your trigger list: which suppliers, which categories, what size of cost move forces an immediate reprice. When the next increase letter lands, you will be executing a plan instead of improvising one.
B2B Price Tiers is coming very soon — formula-driven tiers, drift-proof pricing and two-way Linnworks sync at £29.99/month, with a 14-day free trial at launch. Register your interest here and see more at b2b-prices.mcp-g.com, and make your next price review a 20-minute job.