Quotation is where most pet product importers lose their margin, not in the factory, not in production, but in the format of the number they put in front of a buyer.
Quote the delivery, not the product
A unit price answers a question nobody asked. Your customer is buying a landed product: the unit, the carton, the freight, the duty and the cost of getting it into their warehouse. Every one of those is either in your price or in their margin, and only one of those two is a negotiation.
Build the quotation so that the customer can see the whole thing.
| Line | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Unit price, FOB named port | Product, neutral packaging, export carton, export documentation |
| Order value | The number that determines whether a discount is even relevant |
| Freight estimate | By container, by consolidation, by destination, stated as an assumption rather than a promise |
| Lead time | Broken into production and consolidation, because they fail for different reasons |
| Payment terms | Deposit and balance timing, stated plainly |
MOQ, tier prices and the discount you will be asked for
Show the tiers. If 500 pieces is 100% of the unit price and 2,000 is 92%, that tells the customer something useful: they can decide whether to grow or to add products. Hiding tiers and offering a single number creates a negotiation about the number instead of a conversation about the range.
Be careful with tier prices you cannot honour. If the discount only applies to a quantity you have never produced, it is a promise about the future.
Separate the parts that move at different speeds
A quotation that bundles everything is impossible to renegotiate and impossible to learn from. Separate them.
- Fixed — the unit price, which depends on specification and volume.
- Variable — freight, which depends on routing and season and is not your margin.
- Unknown — anything you genuinely do not know yet, such as a certification cost pending a test result.
Writing to be confirmed after testing is more professional than a number that turns out to be wrong.
The mistakes that cost money
Quoting the cheapest configuration
The cheapest specification is usually the one you do not want: thinner material, fewer colours, smaller size range. Quote the specification you would actually ship, then show the price difference as an option.
Hiding the tooling or sample cost
Charging for a sample, then crediting it against the order, is transparent. A sample fee that appears as a surprise at the end of the process costs you the order.
Not stating what is not included
Say plainly: freight is not included, duty is not included, certificates are not included, and the price assumes neutral packaging with your label. Every one of those exclusions saves an argument later.
How long a quotation stays valid
Give it a date and a reason. Steel prices, resin prices and freight rates move. Valid for 15 days, subject to raw material index movement at time of order, is a professional answer. Valid indefinitely is a claim you will not honour.
The test of a good quotation
Ask a colleague to read it without any context. If they cannot tell what they are buying, how much it costs in total, when it arrives and what is excluded, the quotation is not finished, regardless of how many decimals the unit price has.
