should distributors show prices online, B2B pricing, login pricing, minimum advertised price, trade accounts
Should distributors show prices online? The case against
November 3, 2026
Public, login or per account: a decision rule by buyer and pricing model, the evidence against it, and what six MAP policies say about login pages.
Executive summary
Distributors should not publish one public price list online by default, but hiding every price is worse. Show public prices when buyers are new or small and one price fits everyone. Put account prices behind a login when prices are negotiated or set by level. Check each MAP policy first, because a login does not always exempt you.
A dealer told me they are really hesitant to put lumber pricing online. They are right to hesitate about the thing they were picturing: one price list, open to anyone, competitors included.
That is one of three choices, and for most distributors with trade accounts it is the wrong default. The fearful alternative, hiding every price or staying offline altogether, is worse.
A public price is a promise to everyone. A login price is a promise to one account.
I run ToolSwift, which sells account pricing behind a login among other things, so my bias leans toward the answer below. The evidence against that answer gets its own section.
Who sees the price is three choices, and you can mix them
A public price is visible to anyone with a browser. A login price keeps the catalog public and shows a number after sign-in. A per-account price shows each signed-in customer their own contract, level or quantity break.
There is a fourth path for large orders: no price on screen, and a person involved. A two-store dealer told me they want to stay involved in any big quote. That is a fair position, and it does not stop the same business pricing a box of fittings on screen.
The popular compromise is public list prices with contract prices after login. GenAlpha, which sells customer portal software, recommends that hybrid. It has a flaw. As John Gunderson wrote in HVACR Trends, "List price is rarely used for anything other than negotiating a discount or presenting a price to a good customer to show how much you are discounting their price." A public number nobody pays tells strangers you are expensive and tells them nothing else.
So the choice turns on two questions: who buys from you, and who sets the price. My rule, in the table below: public prices belong to buyers without a negotiated price, and everyone else belongs behind a login. How to map account prices once you get there is a separate job, covered in customer-specific pricing for trade accounts.
A public price list fails most trade distributors
A public price list fails most trade distributors for mechanical reasons, and the first one is your own sales team.
A dealer told me about a competitor that put up a website with prices below what its own salespeople were selling at, from the same stock. The way the dealer saw it, that competitor lost its identity. Scott Sinning of Pricing for Distributors, writing for Distribution Strategy Group, describes the same mechanism in plainer terms: "are your reps lowering branch prices to meet the website, which just cannibalizes margin?" Set the web price too high and it goes unused. Set it too low and customers want it at the branch.
The second reason is that no single number is true. Electrical pricing often runs on quantity breaks and dated flyer specials. Industrial supply runs on levels by category. LED lighting runs on spend-based levels and fixed customer prices. A public page has one slot for a price, and those structures do not fit in it.
The third reason is who your customer is. An electrical wholesaler that sells almost only to stores shows no public prices at all under its wholesale brand, while its other brand, aimed at contractors and homeowners, sells publicly. I think that is exactly right. If your buyer resells the product, your public price is a number their customer can hold up against their shelf tag.
The fourth reason is that competitors can read too. Distribution Strategy Group, in its summary of Gartner's buyer research, warns that "Greater transparency in pricing and availability could also intensify competition, particularly for commoditized products." The more interchangeable the item, the less your public price says about you and the more it says to the shop down the road.
Hiding every price costs you new customers
Hiding every price costs you new customers, though the evidence is observation and adjacent surveys, not a measured price test.
Usability research points this way. Hoa Loranger of Nielsen Norman Group wrote in 2013 that business customers rank pricing as their top need online, that "we watch participants go to competitors' sites when websites do not show prices," and that "People view companies that hide costs as being evasive and untrustworthy." The article publishes no percentages, and it dates from 2013, so treat it as observation rather than measurement.
The buyer data explains why. Distribution Strategy Group surveyed more than 6,000 distributor customers, and PHCP Pros reported in 2021 that when respondents were asked where they shop "very frequently," 49% of those at manufacturing firms said search engines and 23% said distributor websites. For construction firms PHCP reports 44% and 29%, without repeating the "very frequently" wording. PHCP defines shopping here as searching for product and application information, not placing orders. A buyer who arrives from a search engine may have no login.
Gartner adds pressure from another side. Digital Commerce 360 reports that 67% of B2B buyers favor a rep-free experience, from a survey of 646 buyers in August and September 2025. That figure measures rep-free preference across B2B, not price display. No survey I found isolates how trade buyers react to a hidden price.
So here is where my position loses. If your customers are new and small, or your competitors already show price, hiding it costs you. An industrial supplier I spoke with leans toward login-only so that opening an account starts a relationship. That logic holds for a buyer who wants a relationship. A one-time buyer comparing three tabs will take the tab with a number.
A login does not always get you out of MAP
A login page is exempt from a minimum advertised price (MAP) policy only if the manufacturer says so, and in six policies read on November 2, 2026, one says so outright.
Structural Concepts, which makes food display cases, writes that its policy "is not applicable to password-protected (log-in) sites" and allows the phrase "Log-in for Price." General Machine Products, which makes telecom and utility tools, goes the other way: its policy covers internet communication "whether across public or private networks." MIFAB, in plumbing, reads both ways: it names prices "published publicly on the Internet," and it also says a reseller violates the policy by "advertising anywhere to anyone." Schlage, Speakman and Mansfield Plumbing do not mention logins at all.
Six policies are a small sample, chosen because they are public and readable. They prove only that the answer varies.
What they agree on is the useful part. These rules govern what you advertise, and the price you actually sell at stays yours. Schlage's policy is "strictly limited to advertised prices." Structural Concepts says its dealers "are free to sell products at whatever price they may choose."
The law sits nearby. The FTC's guide says the Supreme Court decided in 2007 that manufacturer-imposed price programs get a rule of reason review, and that some state laws treat minimum price rules as illegal per se. Foley & Lardner wrote in August 2025 that pricing in carts or behind login walls "may fall outside the MAP safety zone"; the 2025 federal district court ruling it describes concerned shopping cart restrictions. Foley is writing to manufacturers. The stop-ship notice is yours. I am not a lawyer, so send the policies for your top lines to someone who is before you pick a model.
The cost of a miss runs from a warning to lost supply.
Stale prices are the risk nobody budgets for
A public price that nobody updates is the most expensive kind, because it can break a supplier rule while no one is looking. An industrial supplier I spoke with got minimum-price violation letters because of stale online prices.
The mechanism is simple. MAP floors often hang off the list price: Mansfield sets MAP at 70% of current published list on most lines, Structural Concepts at 50% off published list, and Schlage at 43% off list on two LCN series. When the price book rises and your web price stays put, the floor passes you without anyone touching the website. Then a clock starts: 24 hours at Structural Concepts, 5 business days at Mansfield, 14 days at GMP.
Commodity lines fail differently. NAHB, citing Madison's Lumber Price Index, put the framing lumber composite at $494.51 per 1,000 board feet as of October 23, 2026, down 0.9% in one week. The BLS lumber producer price index went from 280.234 in June 2026 to 291.003 in July, up 3.8% by my arithmetic, then fell 1.6% in August and 1.4% in September. Those are averages, and single items swing harder or softer. A lumber price typed into a web page in June was wrong by July.
Electrical flyer specials have the opposite problem: they carry an end date, and a page keeps showing the price after the date passes. Your customer will still hold you to it.
My test is one question per public price: who changes it, and from what system? If the answer is "whoever remembers," leave that price off the page.
Not yet is the right answer when nobody owns your prices
"Not yet" is the right answer if your prices are decided by a person on every line, your reps do not trust the website, or nobody owns the data.
Gunderson describes the first case well: pricing that is "interactive and decided by inside or outside salespeople on a line-by-line basis." If that is your whole book and your customers are few and known, a price on a website will not help you, and a store will not help much either. Fix the price structure first. Sinning describes the second case: when web prices do not match the branch, reps stop sending customers there, and an unpromoted site earns little.
Not yet has a cost. New buyers will keep finding a competitor with a number on the page, and a public catalog with a clear way to ask for a price only partly closes that gap.
When you are ready, my rule fits in three lines. Publish a public price only on a line where you would honor it for a stranger today, where the manufacturer's policy allows it, and where someone owns the number when it changes. Everything else goes behind a login. The big jobs go to a person.
Where ToolSwift fits
ToolSwift covers the three choices in this article on one catalog. A retail storefront shows public prices, and if you do not sell retail, the same catalog can switch to get a quote or sign in to see pricing. Once customers sign in, they see their own pricing, which you set by customer group, with tiered, product-specific and category-wide prices. That is how you choose by customer: retail customers, trade accounts and other groups each see the products and prices meant for them. Software does not decide your rule or read your MAP policies, so settle both first, then book a demo.
Sources
Related in ToolSwift
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Variants, bulk pricing, customer groups and inventory in one place.