Make Your Own Lab Shopping Pricing Search Engine

At Lab Spend, we analyze a lot of pricing on scientific supplies and chemicals. Labs, distributors and manufactures sometimes ask us what are some good resources to find chemical and product prices.

Welcome to the thrilling world of cleaning data, a good place to get started is to write down all the prices from supplier catalogs. You can request or view them from large distributors such as VWR or Fisher Scientific on line or have them mailed to your lab. Next write down all the information you need about each product such as name, quantity and list price. Using the Fisher catalog as an example, you should end up with about 30,000 products with the total list prices summing to $8.5 million. As you probably already know scientific supplies are not usually purchased based on the list price. To get a better idea of what labs are actually paying, request pricing information from public institutions or look for contracts that are being used such as the NASPO Value Point contract. For example, here is a link to the VWR contract from the NASPO Value Point contract, which lists the discount from list price.

A section of the 6 page discount table is shown above, next locate the category that your product of interest belongs too in the discount table, subtract the discount and the result will give you an idea of what researchers are actually paying. You should keep in mind that prices and discounts do change over time. We built a pricing search engine for scientific lab supplies within Lab Spend that you can use for free, just in case making your search engine looks time consuming and not that exciting.