Price Breaks and Order Rules

A distributor price is not a single number. The same part costs less per piece at 100 than at 10, comes with a minimum quantity you have to reach, and often ships only in fixed multiples — a reel of 5000, a strip of cut tape. Add these together and the lowest unit price is frequently not the cheapest way to buy. PartsBox accounts for all of it when it prices a BOM.

Three rules shape every offer

• Price breaks. The unit price drops at higher quantities, and the break points differ from one distributor to the next.
• Minimum order quantity (MOQ). The smallest amount a vendor will sell. Below it, you cannot buy from that offer — unless rounding up to the minimum still wins on price.
• Order multiples. The quantity has to be a multiple of a fixed number, so an order for 4200 becomes an order for 5000 when the part ships on reels of 5000.

Ranking by effective price

PartsBox ranks offers by effective price: the real cost once any unavoidable excess is counted. When you need 4200 pieces and an offer sells only in reels of 5000, PartsBox counts the 800 you did not want and then compares. It does not discard an offer because your quantity is below its MOQ or off its order multiple. It rounds up and ranks the offer anyway, because a higher price break can still win even after the extra pieces are counted as waste.

A concrete example: you need 4200 pieces. One offer sells cut tape at $0.019 with no minimum; another sells only full reels of 5000 at $0.012. The tape costs $79.80 for exactly 4200. The reel costs $60.00 for 5000, with 800 pieces left over. The reel wins even though a fifth of it is surplus, and PartsBox ranks it first — showing the overage, so nothing is hidden.

The best offer changes with quantity

Because the ranking depends on quantity, the best offer changes with the build size. At a single board, a small distributor often wins. At a full production run, a source that is only competitive at volume takes over. PartsBox surfaces that on its own, so you see when buying more lowers the cost per piece.

The quantity being priced is not the bare BOM quantity, either: per-part attrition is added first, so the ranking reflects what production actually consumes rather than what the schematic counts.

Your own quotes follow the same rules

A negotiated offer carries its own price breaks, minimum quantity, and order multiple in whole vendor packages, and it is ranked on the same terms as a distributor's catalog price. A part bought by length, weight, or volume applies these rules in its own unit and rounds up to whole packages, such as whole spools or reels.

Price breaks and order rules apply automatically wherever PartsBox prices a BOM or a purchase list. BOM pricing starts on the Essentials plan.