Advice needed about Plumbers purchasing habits

[Gideon104]

Hi,

So I'm in the latter stages of setting up a business supplying bathrooms. Our ideal target customers are generally small-medium sized property development companies but we're thinking of expanding our reach to sell to/through plumbers as well.

I was hoping to get the thoughts & opinions of plumbers on here to gather more information about this. If there is anyone here willing to spare a few minutes it would be greatly appreciated. What I really want to know is:

As as plumber, how much do you spend/facilitate spending on bathroom equipment a month?
Is it normal for you to provide the goods to your customer or do you refer the customers to buy themselves?

Any more information or thoughts would be great.


Kind Regards,
Gideon

 

[Paul Murray]

With regards to question 2, my dad fits bathrooms for a living and I believe he provides customers with trade catalogs where they can pick taps, baths, etc from there. He offers them advice on what would be best, and also which systems are easier to fit so they can budget for the work more effectively.

There are times when he has customers who have gone out and bought things themselves then hired him to install them, but on occasion I recall this leading to frustration when certain products don't fit together correctly or something won't fit in the space it was intended for.

Hope that's of some help.

 

[Gideon104]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the response, that information is really helpful!

 

[Bill1954]

Hi Gideon, first of all it's a cut throat business, I'm a partner at Showermania, the online stuff gets harder every week, it seems like whenever you look there are another dozen sites in competition with us. As to plumbers, they will prefer to negotiate hard on prices with you and will usually prefer the supply and fit route as they like to make a wee bit mark up on the products themselves. Of course they show the customers the full book price

 

[HFE Signs]

When we did ours the plumber gave us a catalogue, my wife then went looking, think she Google'd 'most expensive bathrooms in the world' and hey presto cost me a bomb! The plumber was great and fitted everything perfectly but we paid for the materials.

 

[Gideon104]

Thank you both for the replies.

Bill, interesting to hear about your experience, unfortunately I may be responsible for one of those websites cropping up, although not yet set up. Guessing in most cases plumbers that supply & fit will collect the items from a local trade outlet / showroom. May I ask what sort of percentage split you tend to see between web/showroom?

HFE, your wife must have 'good taste', which is really just a cover for 'expensive taste'! But yeah, that makes sense since generally it's more cost effective to buy online.


Cheers,
Gideon