Feature Focus

How Many Emails Does It Take to Get a Supplier Price?

Zigaflow26 June 20266 min read

Purchase Orders12 open

Midocean UK - Polo shirtsPO-0237In Production

PF Concept - Tote bagsPO-0235Part Received

LALTEX Group - Water bottlesPO-0233Awaiting PO

Ralawise - HoodiesPO-0231Received

Midocean UK - LanyardsPO-0229Awaiting PO

If you need prices from multiple suppliers, you probably send separate emails, wait, chase, and compile responses into a spreadsheet. Here is what that process is really costing your business and how a structured RFQ changes it.

If you need a price from four suppliers, you probably send four separate emails. Then you wait. Then you send a follow-up to the two who haven't replied. Then you copy the responses into a spreadsheet - each formatted slightly differently - and try to create a like-for-like comparison. By the time you have everything you need, two or three days have passed and you are not entirely sure which supplier's price ended up in your customer quote. For businesses buying from five, ten, or twenty suppliers on a regular basis, this process is not just inefficient. It quietly drains time and introduces the kind of pricing errors that surface at month-end when the numbers do not add up.

Why the Inbox Makes a Poor Procurement System

Every email-based supplier query starts with good intentions. You know what you need, you know who to ask, and it seems straightforward. The problem is that email threads do not capture the right information in a consistent way. One supplier quotes per unit. Another includes setup costs in the total. A third lists a price excluding delivery. You ask for clarification, which starts a new thread. Now you have three threads per supplier and no clear record of which response reflects the final agreed price.

The other issue is traceability. If your customer comes back six months later with a query about how a job was costed, can you find the supplier prices that underpinned the quote? Most businesses cannot. The emails exist somewhere, buried under hundreds of other conversations, but reconstructing the decision is time-consuming at best and impossible at worst. In businesses where jobs are won on tight margins - construction contractors, promotional merchandise distributors, AV integrators, commercial furniture dealers - that inability to trace procurement decisions creates real financial exposure when disputes arise.

Watch the version control

If you update a supplier price halfway through building a quote and forget to note which version was used, the discrepancy will not surface until the purchase order goes out. By then, the job may already have been won at the wrong margin.

What Gets Lost Between Request and Decision

The gap between sending a price request and making a procurement decision is where most of the problems occur. Suppliers respond at different times. Some send prices valid for 30 days. Others do not include expiry dates at all. When you are managing a busy quote pipeline, you may not remember that the price you pulled from a month-old email has since been superseded by a supplier price increase.

There is also the question of comparison. When supplier responses arrive in different formats, true like-for-like comparison requires you to standardize them manually before you can make a decision. According to analysis published by Tradogram in 2026, organizations using structured procurement workflows report 40% faster procurement cycle times compared to those relying on manual, email-based processes. That gap matters when a customer is waiting for a quote and three of your five suppliers have still not replied.

For businesses that regularly buy project-specific goods - a promotional merchandise distributor pricing branded items from multiple decorators, or an electrical contractor costing materials for a commercial fit-out - the compounding effect of slow, inconsistent supplier responses affects how quickly quotes go out and how accurately they are priced.

What a Structured RFQ Process Changes

A request for quotation (RFQ) is a formal document sent to one or more suppliers setting out exactly what you need, in what quantity, by when, and on what terms. Unlike an informal email, a structured RFQ asks every supplier to respond in the same format - making comparison straightforward once the responses come in.

The process, as documented by procurement specialists at Sievo, starts with document preparation: specifying requirements clearly enough that every supplier is working from the same brief. That investment up front pays dividends at the evaluation stage, where well-structured responses can be assessed side by side without additional clarification rounds.

For businesses that buy the same types of products or materials repeatedly, standardized RFQ templates reduce preparation time on each cycle. Once the template exists, sending a new price request takes minutes rather than the half-hour it takes to construct individual emails, wait for gaps in focus, and then remember to follow up on the ones that did not come back.

Set a response deadline on every RFQ

A price request without a submission date generates responses at unpredictable times, making comparison harder. Setting a clear deadline means you can evaluate all responses at the same point and make a decision rather than waiting indefinitely for the last reply.

When the Supplier Quote Connects to the Customer Quote

The most significant efficiency gain comes when supplier price requests link directly to the quoting process. If you are pricing a job for a customer and you need supplier costs to build the quote, an integrated RFQ means the prices that come back from suppliers flow into the quote being built - rather than sitting in an email that you then re-key manually.

Manual re-keying is one of the more common sources of margin error in project-based businesses. A price transcribed incorrectly from a supplier email - even by a small amount on a high-volume line - can turn a profitable quote into a break-even job. When the supplier quote response and the customer quote share a connected record, that risk reduces substantially.

Zigaflow's RFQ feature sits within the same workflow as quotes, purchase orders, and jobs. When a supplier responds to a price request, their costs can be used directly in the linked quote and converted into a purchase order once the job is confirmed. The audit trail - who was asked, what they quoted, when they responded, and which price was selected - stays attached to the job record rather than scattered across an inbox.

Who this matters most for

Businesses that buy project-specific goods or materials to fulfill customer orders see the greatest benefit from connected RFQ workflows. Promotional merchandise distributors, construction contractors, AV integrators, and commercial furniture dealers all follow this pattern regularly.

The Discipline Behind Consistent Procurement

Formalizing supplier price requests does not require complex software configuration or weeks of process redesign. It starts with three things: a consistent template that asks suppliers to respond in the same format, a clear deadline for responses, and a way to connect supplier costs to the quotes and purchase orders that follow.

Businesses that treat RFQs as a routine operational discipline - rather than something reserved for large contracts or unusual purchases - find that their procurement data becomes genuinely useful over time. Price histories, supplier response rates, and cost variances between original quotes and final purchase orders all become visible. That visibility is difficult to create from an inbox and a spreadsheet, but it is a natural byproduct of a structured process.

The question at the start of this piece does not have a fixed answer. But in most businesses, the honest answer is more than it should be. When procurement has structure, the answer gets smaller - and the job costing that depends on it gets more accurate.

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