BlogRunning the place, updated
Price levels, and the folder nobody can find
Wholesale has never had one price. It has a price per customer, and at most nurseries that lives in a list printed in February, a folder of letters, and the memory of one person who knows that Hendricks gets the sheet price, Maple Row is ten off, and the garden centre on the state road has had the same number since 2019. It works until the day it fails, which is usually a busy one.
What a price level does
A price level replaces the per-customer price with a handful of named levels, such as Retail, Landscape, Re-wholesale and Key account. Every customer is put on one, and the level decides what they pay. A new customer then becomes a decision rather than a negotiation, because placing them at Landscape sets their pricing. A price rise becomes one edit instead of forty, since raising Landscape moves every landscaper together.
A level does not have to price everything. Set the twenty products that matter and let the rest sell at their normal price. A level can also carry quantity breaks, for example $3.25 for one to forty-nine and $2.90 for fifty and up, and a spring season whose prices stand in for the year-round ones while it runs.
The benefit growers tend to underestimate is that anybody can quote. When pricing sits in levels, whoever answers the phone in April can give a correct number without finding you. Levels also show you what you charge, and most growers who write theirs down find two or three customers who have drifted well below where they should be.
Why paper pricing goes wrong
Paper cannot enforce anything. The printed list goes stale as soon as costs move, and a discount pencilled in the margin of one copy turns into a permanent one, because nobody can see it to revisit it. Two people taking orders will quote two different numbers, and a sheet with every level on it can end up in a customer's office. Worst of all, if pricing lives in one person's memory, the business cannot be sold, inherited or stepped away from without losing it.
Whatever software you run, name the levels you already have (four or five covers nearly every nursery), put every customer on one, and look hard at the ones that do not fit. Write exceptions down as exceptions, noting who, how much and why, because an exception you can read is one you can end. Then review them once a year, before the season. A family yard might need only two levels and a larger operation six, but the discipline is the same, and most pricing money is lost between the decision and the invoice rather than in the decision itself.
How price levels work in Sprout
In Sprout each customer sits on one named level, prices are set per product, and anything not priced on a level falls through to the product's own price. Quantity breaks re-price a line when its quantity crosses a break, unless the line was priced by hand. A season's prices apply by the order's ship date, so a spring order placed in January gets spring pricing without anyone switching anything. The same rule decides the price on an order in the app and in your shop, and buyers you approve see only their own level's prices. A small grower can set it up in an afternoon, and a larger one can hand quoting to anyone on the sales team without handing them the folder.