Before You Buy Promotional Products, Research Options and Pricing

Logo Mall is an online product search engine with more than 300,000 products that is offered to promotional distributors for a fee. The Advertising Specialties Institute publishes supplier data, and distributors use the engine to identify potential products for their customers.

The reason to search Logo Mall is to brainstorm ideas and make sure your distributor is providing you with the best products at the best price. As an independent event planner, I provide public access to the database as a free service for my clients.

First, event planners should understand that if they do place orders for products using a distributor's Logo Mall catalog, they are not placing orders directly with the suppliers through Logo Mall.

Instead, search the items and discuss the pros and cons associated with various suppliers with your promotional products distributor in order to achieve maximum value.

Nearly 4,200 suppliers promote their products to promotional products distributors using Logo Mall, and the pricing is updated regularly.

Logo Mall offers several ways to search the engine, but I suggest that event planners enter their own criteria and price ranges to find what products are available. Once products show up, the database offers the ability to sort by price; the database also provides subcategory items to help narrow the search.

For those who don't know what they want to buy, Logo Mall also has a product search tool that provides 600 pre-populated categories in a drop-down menu format.

Once you find different items, you will notice that the suppliers offer price breaks at various quantity levels: the more you purchase, the lower the unit price.

It's important to note that promotional products suppliers often change their pricing at year end, and pricing in Logo Mall doesn't always get updated until after price changes occur. Talk to your distributor about securing best pricing.

Some general tips:

• Promotional products distributors are paid a percentage of the sale.
  
  
• Event planners should request pricing at the "next column" or "end column" unit price.
  
  
• A long-term, fair negotiation strategy for both parties is to agree on a discount of about 5% on first column pricing and 3% on all subsequent columns.
  
  
• For items purchase frequently, request a "coop program" to secure your unit cost for up to 2 years.
  
  
• Suppliers aren't usually flexible on set-up charges; if "no setup fee," understand that it's still there, but just buried in the unit cost.