Fuel Surcharges

[SalesServiceGuy]

With gas up over $8.00 per US/gallon in Canada with no return to normal pricing in sight, dealers and service providers, especially those that operate a few cube vans or larger for furniture deliveries are seeking ways to recover their increased costs.

Some dealers sign 60 month service contracts with no escalators, some manually escalate their cpcs every year and some have invested in software programs that automatically escalate the cpc by up to 10% per year.

Some dealers deliver toner at No Charge and some are starting to charge a delivery fee.

Some dealers charge an annual connectivity fee of up to $250.00 per year.

Some dealers charge $25.00 per call for telephone support.

Some dealers are no thinking about adding an Admin fee of approx $5.00 per month to recover some of their added cost of gasoline. We all know that the trucking industry for years has been routinely adds fuel surcharges to their spot freight rates.

What is your experience?

Certainly as a salesperson, nobody likes to detail any increased cost that might kill a sale.

Customers do tend to highlight in their mind small differences in cpc costs over other surcharges. when choosing a copier vendor.

[mloudy]

Re: Fuel Surcharges

I just got an interterritorial from a Sharp OEM branch with a locked 36 month cpp an no minimums. These are agreed upon cpp rates that we enrolled in with the OEM. The starting cpp is fixed in the agreement with all dealers that are enrolled but there is not a stated lock of cpp or limit on increases. There is also another ccp rate which is lower and it has monthly minimums.
I signed the agreement and let them know that after this one we would no longer accept an ITT that has a locked cpp for more than 12 months.

We also had a school system for 25 years that went with another vendor 5 years ago and it turned into a "nightmare" for them. They sent me a bid packet 2 months ago and their terms and conditions were completely ridiculous. The 5 year locked cpp was the deal killer for me. I knew some dealer would be stupid enough to agree to a 5 year locked cpp and they did.

[SalesServiceGuy]

Re: Fuel Surcharges

I just got an interterritorial from a Sharp OEM branch with a locked 36 month cpp an no minimums. These are agreed upon cpp rates that we enrolled in with the OEM. The starting cpp is fixed in the agreement with all dealers that are enrolled but there is not a stated lock of cpp or limit on increases. There is also another ccp rate which is lower and it has monthly minimums.
I signed the agreement and let them know that after this one we would no longer accept an ITT that has a locked cpp for more than 12 months.

We also had a school system for 25 years that went with another vendor 5 years ago and it turned into a "nightmare" for them. They sent me a bid packet 2 months ago and their terms and conditions were completely ridiculous. The 5 year locked cpp was the deal killer for me. I knew some dealer would be stupid enough to agree to a 5 year locked cpp and they did.

... in my territory we were sad then/happy now that we lost all of our School Board accounts in a very large account to drive across to Xerox. The cpcs were crazy low. I think this School Board is going to be in for a big price increase come renewal time.

With inventory hard to get and profitability hard to maintain, I am not even sure we want to bother to quote School Boards again.

I find most gov't accounts value price more than long term reliability and service.

Inter-territorials are part of the expectation when you partner with an OEM. If you decline an install, you are inviting them to find another local service provider. You have to consider the revenue on the entire fleet of installs they give you and not a specific copier. OEMs that sign big deals cannot have 50 different service agreements with 50 different dealers.