Timber is where pricing discipline goes to die. Costs swing with every mill delivery, half your customers are on "a price we sorted out years ago", and the difference between retail and trade on a length of 47x100 might be pennies — pennies that add up to your entire margin across a truss order. Builders merchant pricing software has one job: keep your price ladder coherent while the ground moves underneath it. Here is how merchants running on Linnworks can structure it, and what is coming to make it dramatically easier.
The three-ladder problem: retail, trade, account
Most builders merchants run at least three effective price levels. Retail is the walk-in DIYer — full price, no questions. Trade is anyone with a trade card or a van sign — typically 10–20% off retail. Account is the builders you invoice monthly, who have negotiated harder and buy in volume — deeper again, sometimes with category-specific deals ("his rate on sheet materials is better than his rate on ironmongery").
The problem is not designing this ladder — everyone has one. The problem is that on most merchants' systems, it exists as a spreadsheet, a discount habit, and the memory of whoever has been on the counter longest. Ladders maintained that way drift: trade prices that stopped tracking cost two increases ago, account customers whose "temporary" rate became permanent in 2019, and retail prices that undercut trade on a handful of lines because someone updated one and not the other. If that sounds familiar, our piece on tiered pricing in Linnworks without spreadsheets covers why the spreadsheet is the disease, not the cure.
Commodity lines punish sloppy maths
Tiering matters most where margins are thinnest, and nothing is thinner than commodity timber and sheet materials. On CLS, carcassing and OSB, the market price is common knowledge — every builder knows roughly what a sheet of 18mm OSB3 costs this month, because he bought some last week somewhere else. Price 5% over the going rate and the volume goes elsewhere; price 5% under and you are hauling heavy, low-value product for nothing.
That means commodity tiers need to be formula-driven from cost, not set-and-forget from retail. When your buying price on carcassing moves — and it will, several times a year — a trade price defined as "cost plus 22%" is still right the day after the increase. A trade price that was hand-typed eight months ago is now whatever the market has drifted away from. The merchants who protect margin through timber cost swings are not the ones who react fastest; they are the ones whose prices are formulas, so reacting means changing one input.
Repricing a category with one formula change
Picture the mill letter landing: softwood up 8% from the first of the month. The spreadsheet merchant now faces an afternoon of updating every carcassing SKU across three price levels, then keying the results into Linnworks, then finding the two lines that got missed when a customer queries an oddly cheap price in August.
The formula merchant changes the costs and lets the tier maths cascade: trade recalculates at cost-plus, account tiers recalculate at their agreed depths, and retail rounds back to sensible price points. This is exactly the model behind B2B Price Tiers, our wholesale pricing engine for Linnworks, which is coming very soon. It gives you unlimited named tiers, a formula engine that works cost-up or RRP-down, attractive-price rounding to .99, .95 or .49 endings, and a spreadsheet-style grid with inline editing and bulk maths for the exceptions — with every tier price synced two ways into Linnworks as native extended properties, so your prices live in your system, not in an export.
What one-formula repricing looks like
- Update costs on the affected category (CSV import handles a mill list in one go).
- Tier prices recalculate from their formulas — cost-up for commodity lines, RRP-down where you price from retail.
- Rounding rules keep the results looking like prices, not calculator output — £8.99, not £9.0342.
- Two-way Linnworks sync writes the new tier prices back as extended properties, ready for your channels and counter tools.
Twenty minutes, not an afternoon — and no missed lines, because nothing was retyped.
Account customers without anarchy
The deepest pricing rot at merchants is the one-off deal. Every account customer believes he has a special arrangement, and after a decade of counter-side generosity, most of them are right — which means nobody knows what anything actually sells for. The sustainable structure is a small set of named tiers — Trade, Account, Account Plus, whatever fits your book — with each customer assigned to one, and genuine exceptions handled as exactly that: exceptions. B2B Price Tiers supports customer-to-tier assignment and per-tier minimum order values, so the better ladder rungs are reserved for customers whose volumes earn them. We have written more on where the line sits in customer-specific pricing versus price tiers.
Tiers also close the loop with the counter: B2B Price Tiers is built to integrate with Trade Order POS, so the tier a customer sits in is the price the counter quotes — one source of truth from the price file to the till.
Getting ready before it lands
If your timber pricing currently lives in a spreadsheet, the preparation is worth doing now: decide your tier names, work out the real formula behind each (what is trade actually meant to be, cost-plus what?), and list the account customers whose deals genuinely differ from the ladder. When the tooling arrives, you will be configuring a system rather than excavating one.
B2B Price Tiers — formula-driven tiers, bulk repricing, rounding rules and two-way Linnworks sync — is coming very soon at £29.99/month with a 14-day free trial at launch. Register your interest here and see the full details at b2b-prices.mcp-g.com to be first in when it goes live.