What's going on with Supplyhouse.com

The amount of man hours lost on having to run out to pick up the correct materials is ridiculous and the response I get from the those wholesalers is oh we’re sorry. 

The "we're sorry" is now automatic by all of my distributors. I swear they take them to school to review how to say "we're sorry" in a somewhat convincing way when we all know they couldn't give a damn about the fact that your entire schedule is f'ed without that part.

From all the responses thus far, it seems dealing with these online discount supply houses is playing a kind of Russian Roulette to get parts on time. Local quality Plumbing Supply businesses are willing to work with professional contractors at wholesale prices and stock the commonly needed parts if requested available same day - not a fan of relying on some mail order purchase in this postal environment. Maybe Im a bit old fashioned in this regard, but I support small family businesses that also provide expert advice

Regards,

RTW

RE: Online purchasing

Dont get me wrong, online purchasing has its place eg. my cat required a liquid solution that could be administered at home and the vet charged $30 for the package that required multiple does over many months. The same identical solution brand and quantity was $10.99 on Chewey.com mail order. I brought this to the vets attention and they dropped their price for me to $15. It was break - even with shipping costs

Not trying to change topic, just in agreement with the benefits of online purchasing mentioned in this thread. The vet's secretary mentioned they pay more than $10.99 and so I mentioned maybe you should be getting it from Chewy.com, just sayin

Regards,

Bob

I think Supply House does a great job and keeps improving. Deliveries have become slower. My observation is that slower deliveries originated with UPS and not Supply House. The UPS tracking delivery dates just started to be wrong. Packages began to arrive day(s) later than UPS said they would.

For a brief period online sales were not subject to sales tax, in some states. That was an additional perk

Free returns is another nice offering with the Trademaster program

I wonder what % of their business is online vs phone orders? I have only used the online ordering

We have done some training webinars for them. Both for their team and also some open to their customers.

Every time I do a live event at Rathe and Associates on Long Island they send part of their team. So they are progressive in education also.

I’m in the middle of a bathroom remodel. I went to the close by plumbing supply house, a national brand, to support local business. Got a price for three valves, tub shower and lav. It will have a freestanding tub and faucet. One was on the shelf, two had to be ordered

I priced basic MOEN stuff. The freestanding tub faucet was 1700 bucks, a price you can find online, supposedly contractor price.

I found the same faucet from an e-commerce faucet site for under 1200 bucks, a price also available online. So no forum rules broken.

Oddly enough it arrived in a box with a well known national plumbing wholesalers name on it.

Did it come from the exact same warehouse? Did I save 500 bucks by just clicking the right or lucky order now button ?

All told, for the 3 faucets a $1,000.00 savings.

I like to, and will shop locally when I can. But saving a thousand bucks!

As Lyle Lovett might ask, that wouldn’t make me a shallow person, would it?

All of their catalogs have things that are easy to find and other things that are nearly impossible to find. They all do a good job but there will always be things they didn't account for about some products or ways you are searching they didn't expect.

You can use google to find things their search doesn't find. Some things like a lot of electrical parts have so many variations that you really need to just look at the manufacture's catalog or cut sheet and get the part number then search for that.

Things like a hydrolevel where there are about 50 variations and they have around $100 tied up in each part have to be a nightmare to figure out what inventory to have in stock.

hey @Mad Dog_2 dont search for nipples using the search tool. Use their popup menu thing at the top of the page to bring up fittings and nipples