Guidelines · · 4 min read
Stocking fat dissolvers: when the bulk discount costs you money
Fillers punish you for ordering too little. You run out halfway through a list, someone drives across town, and the cost is an afternoon. A slow-moving line punishes you in the opposite direction, and the cost is the stock itself — whether fat dissolvers are a slow line in your clinic is something only your own consumption figures will tell you. That flips how the buying decision should be made — and it makes the discount ladder something to check with a calculator rather than accept.
On a fast line the tier ladder is close to free money: you were going to get through twenty packs anyway, so take the 10%. On a slow line, every step up the ladder is a bet that the back of the box gets used before it dates.
The number that settles it is your own. Packs consumed per month, read off the last six or twelve months of bookings, not off an intention to grow the body side of the practice. Forecasts made at the moment of ordering tend to be optimistic in precisely the direction that fills a shelf.
A pack is not a vial
Bulk tiers count packs. Lipolytics are commonly sold in multi-vial or multi-ampoule packs, so a single unit on the discount ladder can be four, five, ten or twenty vials. Twenty units of a ten-vial line is two hundred vials.
Read the pack contents before you read the tier table. Every listing under /store/fat-dissolvers states what a pack holds, and the tier quantity counts those packs, not the vials inside them. It is an easy way to commit to five times the volume you had in mind.
Some products also have a separate window once a vial is opened or reconstituted, and it can be much shorter than the unopened shelf life. Whether the one you stock has such a window, and how long it runs, is on the manufacturer's instructions for use. It is not on any listing, ours included.
What a tier is actually worth, in packs
Take a ladder of 3% at five units, 5% at ten, 8% at fifteen and 10% at twenty — check the tiers on the line in front of you before reusing these figures, because not every product carries tiers at all. Take a round EUR 100 a pack — an illustrative figure for the arithmetic, not a price — and those four orders cost EUR 485, 950, 1380 and 1800 against list totals of 500, 1000, 1500 and 2000.
Now throw one pack away.
- Five units at 3%. You saved EUR 15 and binned 100. Against simply buying four at list you are EUR 85 down — the write-off costs close to seven times what the tier paid you.
- Ten units at 5%. Saved 50, binned 100, so you land EUR 50 behind buying nine at list.
- Fifteen units at 8%. Saved 120, so one write-off still leaves you EUR 20 ahead. A second puts you 80 down.
- Twenty units at 10%. Saved 200. Two write-offs is exactly break-even. The third costs EUR 100.
Compare against the order you would otherwise place
List price is the wrong benchmark, because nobody weighing up twenty units was choosing between twenty and none. The live question is the step: ten instead of five, twenty instead of fifteen.
Priced by the step, the ladder is steeper than the headline. The first five packs cost 3% below list. The second five effectively cost 7% below, the third 14%, the fourth 16%. Each block of five is genuinely cheaper than the block before it.
Those are also the packs most likely to expire — they go in last and come out last. The cheapest product in the box is the product you are least likely to use, which is this category's whole tension in a sentence.
Splitting costs less than it looks, too. Two orders of five come to EUR 970 against 950 for one order of ten: EUR 20, plus a second delivery charge. Set your own delivery cost against that 20 and you have the price of keeping the second five optional. On a line you are unsure about, it is often worth paying.
Before committing to a tier on a slow line
- Packs used per month over the last six months, from your records rather than a projection.
- Months of cover the order represents: order quantity divided by that monthly figure.
- The dated expiry window the order will actually ship against. Ask before you commit, not when it arrives.
- Whether the supplier will hold part of the order and release it on a schedule.
- Whether short-dated stock can be returned or exchanged. Assume it cannot, and get the answer in writing before you rely on it.
- The in-use window on the IFU, if the product has one, and whether your session pattern fits inside it.
- Storage conditions on the IFU, and whether you have the space to hold that many packs correctly.
Rotation is the half of this that costs nothing
Record the expiry at goods-in rather than at first use. A batch logged the day it arrives is a batch you can rotate. One discovered on the shelf in month nine is a write-off with paperwork attached.
Then dispense first-expiring-first, and keep slow lines where they are visible. Fillers get handled every week and rotate themselves. A lipolytic sitting in a cupboard behind them does not, and the pack at the back is the one you paid the discount for.
The tiers are not the problem. Twenty units at 10% is a good price for a line you will genuinely get through, and for a busy body service it may be the obvious order. It is a poor price for a line you stock because a patient asked about it once. The arithmetic will not tell you which of the two you have. Your own consumption figures will, and they are usually the number nobody looks up before pressing the tier.
- guidelines
- lipolysis
- body
Written for trade customers of Keypills Medical Ltd. It covers purchasing, handling and storage — not clinical practice. Always follow the manufacturer’s instructions for use and your own professional and regulatory obligations for any product you administer.
