NetPricer Emerges as a Net/Net Victory for Contractors and Distributors
Chuck Ross
Living in a semi-rural location where the closes mall is a half-hour drive away – and is often lacking in choice – I end up doing a lot of shopping online, and some recent statistics prove I’m not alone. In 2023, on Cyber Monday, alone, U.S. consumers spent $12 billion on their holiday shopping, making Monday, Nov. 27, 2023, the biggest online shopping day in U.S. history.
As shoppers, we’ve come to expect current product information, including product descriptions and accurate pricing, from online retailers. Electrical contractors and electricians, though, can have a more challenging time hunting down – and trusting – the product and cost data they need to put together estimates their clients can depend on. And distributors can struggle, too, to keep their online catalogs up to date, and they sometimes must do their own scrambling to make sure the web-based cost information they’re providing is accurate for their contractor customers.
NetPricer was developed as a subscription-based service that helps professionals on both sides of this conversation trust that they’re working with numbers they can trust. “NetPricer created a portal that both the contractor and distributor could communicate through to allow these pricing transactions to take place in real time,” says Sal Huerta, NetPricer’s vice president of business development. “The NetPricer process took what was a manual process and computerized it, which increased productivity, eliminated errors and provided the data back to the contractor in seconds.”
Both distributors and contractors benefit, Huerta says, including freeing up distributors’ staff time. “NetPricer has done all the heavy lifting in this process – in a number of cases, NetPricer does 90-plus percent of the work for a distributor to be a part of our network.”
And for contractors, the service offers direct integration into most estimating software packages/ “So, there’s no more factoring or using discounts on generic prices to come up with a price that might or might not be close, or having to guess if the distributor has the exact manufacturer they are looking for,” Huerta says. “It also integrates with the online catalog Smart eCat, so a contractor can now import any item for the over 2 million items in that program directly into their bid or add it to their estimating software database.”
As shoppers, we’ve come to expect current product information, including product descriptions and accurate pricing, from online retailers. Electrical contractors and electricians, though, can have a more challenging time hunting down – and trusting – the product and cost data they need to put together estimates their clients can depend on. And distributors can struggle, too, to keep their online catalogs up to date, and they sometimes must do their own scrambling to make sure the web-based cost information they’re providing is accurate for their contractor customers.
NetPricer was developed as a subscription-based service that helps professionals on both sides of this conversation trust that they’re working with numbers they can trust. “NetPricer created a portal that both the contractor and distributor could communicate through to allow these pricing transactions to take place in real time,” says Sal Huerta, NetPricer’s vice president of business development. “The NetPricer process took what was a manual process and computerized it, which increased productivity, eliminated errors and provided the data back to the contractor in seconds.”
Both distributors and contractors benefit, Huerta says, including freeing up distributors’ staff time. “NetPricer has done all the heavy lifting in this process – in a number of cases, NetPricer does 90-plus percent of the work for a distributor to be a part of our network.”
And for contractors, the service offers direct integration into most estimating software packages/ “So, there’s no more factoring or using discounts on generic prices to come up with a price that might or might not be close, or having to guess if the distributor has the exact manufacturer they are looking for,” Huerta says. “It also integrates with the online catalog Smart eCat, so a contractor can now import any item for the over 2 million items in that program directly into their bid or add it to their estimating software database.”
Photo courtesy of NetPricer
