Unit price is the wrong number

Ask a practice what they pay for nitrile gloves and you will usually get a number per box. Ask what they pay to have that box arrive and the answer is less certain, because the two figures live in different places: one on the product page, one at checkout, often on a different vendor's site entirely.

That gap is where supply budgets quietly leak. A vendor who is cheapest per unit and charges for delivery can cost more per order than one who is slightly dearer and ships free — and the comparison is invisible unless somebody runs it deliberately, line by line, every time.

The total (price + shipping) is what leaves your account: unit price plus that vendor's shipping for that order. It is not a clever metric. It is the only number that answers the question a practice is actually asking, which is what this will cost.

Ranking on it changes who wins. A vendor at $10.00 a box charging $4.00 delivery lands at $14.00. A vendor at $11.00 shipping free lands at $11.00. The first looks cheaper on every product page in the industry and costs $3.00 more per line, every line, indefinitely.

Not because practices are careless. A practice orders a few hundred line items a year; checking each one properly means opening several tabs, signing into several accounts, and normalizing pack sizes that are described differently by each vendor. The work is real and the clinic day is full.

So the order goes where it went last time. This is a rational response to a genuine time constraint, and it is exactly why the gap persists: it is an information problem wearing the costume of a negotiating problem.

The total (price + shipping) is the right default, not the only answer. Sometimes the question is unit price — when you are comparing like with like on volume and shipping will be amortized anyway. Sometimes it is delivery speed, because you needed it yesterday and $3 is not the deciding factor.

The useful thing is being able to switch between the three and see immediately who leads on each. A vendor who wins on speed and loses on cost is a perfectly good choice, as long as you chose it.