Why should I spend additional money on suppliers that charge more than powdercity?

It's frustrating to me when lower prices are associated with lower quality.

I completely agree. A lot of people don't full understand just what it takes for both our stores to charge such low prices. It's not that we are skimping on anything. It's that we get creative with supply chains, and use volume to help bring costs down. For us in particular, Ceretropic's revenue pretty much subsidized Nootropics Depot till very recently. Shit is expensive, and I still have about a million dollars in equipment we need.

One example of a recent addition to the quality process is retaining 1 unit per each batch of finished goods. When a customer claims a product doesn't taste/smell right, even though we perform organoleptic on raw material lots, we'll be able to now perform organoleptics on any finished goods batch without relying on a customer return. Given that our average finished goods batch size is around 50 units, the cost is going to be substantial, essentially driving the cost of every product up 2%.

Yeah, that is a hassle. We retain samples of everything as well. We always go back and retest when people complain about a product. We've never found anything wrong, but it's best to take every claim seriously. It's surprising your lot sizes are so low, though. I would have thought they would be a lot higher than that. It would be interesting to see your operation. We are about to move to all digital automation in our testing, production, tracking, and QC procedures. No more paper tracking sheets and manual data entry! Everything is now on Android tablets, and everything is an automated hand-off. I am excited!

And now that we're getting estimates for a move to a newer facility, I'm feeling the cash flow crunch more than ever.

Yeah, I feel that. We are spending so much money, it's insane. We just got a second building in the same complex, to keep the logistics reasonable. When we buy our own building, it's going to be a very complex and expensive endeavor.

I have to defend this point. Pricing optimization/analysis is its own discipline; part marketing and part supply chain. Aside from matching some competitor prices, price changes are also made based on product-specific conversion rates and total margins. If we lower a price, and there's a percent increase in product margin over the old price due to increased volume, then it makes sense to stick with the lower price. If the increase in sales after a price drop isn't enough to cover the lost margin per unit, then it doesn't make business sense to keep the lower price. If pricing seems favorable for one of our products, there's some data behind it.

Ohh, I agree, and I commend you on the effectiveness of that system. It clearly works, as evidenced by this post. I certainly understand why you do it. We just have different strategies in how we run things, and that is okay.

MYASD, I'm not sure if you have a similar sentiment, but my biggest fear isn't an established competitor; it's the new vendor with a unique product and great marketing/SEO who doesn't spend the money on quality. Market visibility tends to trump quality processes in influencing uninformed purchasing decisions, at least until quality issues arise that shed light on the lack of quality control for some new vendors.

I agree as well. It's not really my biggest fear, though. Mine is legal and regulatory interference. We are a large target now, and are currently dealing with multiple legal issues. I'm sure you guys have had similar things happen as well. It's a shame that some competition cannot grow their businesses using their ideas and business sense. They have to turn to underhanded attacks, or legal extortion, to try and get themselves ahead. I am not afraid of honest competition. I am confident in my ideas and abilities to honestly grow businesses. It's the attacks and legal bullshit that is pissing me off right now. Me being an outspoken person who calls vendor's out for their BS just makes me that much more visible of a target. Right now, I have evidence that multiple vendors are selling fake products. However, I have not made the posts yet, because there is a very real possibility that they will try to attack myself or my companies after I call them out. My team is pleading with me to stop openly calling companies out, because of the blowback. This is why we need a nonprofit that can handle these things. I need someone else to be the face of it, and to insulate myself from these issues. Because I too hate the fact that people are selling fake and impure product to others in the community. It pisses me off more than you can imagine. I would spend every waking moment going after them if I could. I am just responsible for too many people now to take that risk on.