DealTrack Blog — Supplier Rebates

Supplier rebates should lower your costs, while helping you form lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with the businesses you buy from.

Trading agreements involving rebates are prevalent in many industries such as building materials, lumber, HVAC, electrical distributors, buying groups of all types and other wholesale distribution businesses. Rebates are used by suppliers to these industries to influence purchase decisions and drive profitable growth for both the supplier and the wholesaler.

Rebates were “invented” as a way of driving sales growth without simply reducing the contract price. By agreeing retrospective financial incentives based on actual sales, both the supplier and the distributor are working together to drive market share and growth. Rebate agreements are becoming increasingly more creative and many are finding that “standard” business systems don’t facilitate this creativity.

This need for an auditable process and the desire to use very creative deal mechanisms as a vehicle for growth has resulted in a new paradigm of business system — the rebate management system.