What should we care about on PCBA quotations

To be PCB a trader with good performance, as we all known, you must be a good negotiator, negotiate with your customer to make a deal with reasonable profit, negotiate with your boss to offer a best price for your client ,make a win-win deal and then develop long-time business relationship.

However, is that enough? No, that’s far from enough. To make a win-win deal and sustain long-time relationship is not that easy. You must also be a professional and careful person that can care and deal with every order details precisely. Otherwise, it’s easy for you to lose a valuable potential customer.

Take my own experience for example. I am a PCB trader. There once a time I met with a customer that need my quotation for a musical PCBA. After my quotation, he is satisfied with the price for mass production and would like to make some samples for 5 units PCBA , but the price we offered is much higher than his target price. After several days negotiation, to promote our first deal, our boss decided to do a losing deal and agreed his target price. I feel so thrilled and replied to my customer, later asked me for PI of PCB prototype and mass production.

However, after the PI, the customer reflected that the price for mass production is not acceptable as he later received many quotations from other PCB suppliers that offer much lower than mine. I have a double check with my purchaser and confirm the last price we can offer which is still much higher than customers’ target price. At that time, I feel very angry and thought it is probably that the client is playing a trick with me and use this way to bargain with us.

This time I am very firm and decided to left him alone for several days, hope he can compromise. However, I didn’t receive any feedback since then. About 1 week later, I sent an email again to confirm the last price he can accept, he replied and still gave me the same price which is much higher than our best price. At that time, I began to feel doubted again on my quotation, so I decided to confirm the component cost with our purchaser and supplier one by one. At last, we found that there is a part that the supplier quoted a wrong price which is 20 times higher than the original one. I replied and apologize to the client immediately, however, it’s too late, the supplier has already co-operated with another PCB assembly factory.

So as a PCB trader, when you deal with PCBA project, you must be clear about the BOM list and have a general concept of the price for every electronic parts. Sometimes, the supplier or purchaser may quote wrongly inevitably, with related knowledge equipped, it will be much easier for you to recognize the error and avoid losing a good and valuable customer.