The distributor side of the request loop: one click makes a link carrying your distributorship's name, the supplier fills it out free, and the submission imports into your brand list at your margins.
Most of Alculator moves pricing outward — a supplier builds a model and shares it. Request Pricing runs the loop the other way. As a distributor, you send one link; the supplier types their products and FOB prices into a form addressed from your company; and what comes back is structured data you can import with a single click instead of a spreadsheet you retype.
On the Brands page, click Request Pricing. Alculator creates a unique link branded with your distributorship's name — copy it and send it any way you like. The supplier fills out their products and pricing free, with no account. Their submission appears in your Pricing Requests inbox marked New; click Accept and it imports as a brand priced at your margins.
The usual way distributor pricing gets collected is a chase: an email asking for a price sheet, a PDF that comes back in someone else's format, and an afternoon of retyping. A pricing request replaces all of that with one URL. The supplier does the typing — into a form that already speaks Alculator's language of SKUs, sizes, pack formats, and FOB per case — and you receive a submission that drops into your brand list intact.
This article covers your side of the exchange. What the supplier sees when they open your link is the subject of Responding to a Pricing Request.
Open the Brands page in your dashboard. In the page header, next to + New Brand, sits the Request Pricing button. One click creates the link and opens a small modal showing it — a unique alculator.io/r/… URL with a Copy Link button beside it. That's the entire creation flow; there is no form to fill in first.
The link carries your name, not Alculator's. The form the supplier opens is addressed from your distributorship — the company name on your profile — so the ask reads as coming from you. On a Trade team, links created by any member belong to the shared workspace and carry the workspace's company name, and every reply lands in the same inbox.
Each click of the button creates a fresh, separate request. Send a different link to each supplier and you'll always know whose submission is whose when they come back.
Alculator doesn't send the link for you, and it doesn't ask for the supplier's email to create one. Copy it and deliver it through whatever channel the relationship already runs on — email, text, a portal message, a business card at a trade show. The link is the whole handshake: no invitation step, no recipient setup, nothing the supplier has to install or sign up for.
If you lose track of a link before the supplier responds, its card in the inbox keeps a Copy Link button, so you can re-copy and re-send it any time.
Once you have open requests, a Pricing Requests panel appears at the top of the Brands page with a count of how many are in flight. Each request shows one card with a status pill that tracks the supplier's progress:
| Pill | What it means | Action on the card |
|---|---|---|
| Pending | Link created; the supplier hasn't opened it yet ("Awaiting response") | Copy Link |
| Viewed | The supplier opened the form but hasn't submitted ("Opened — awaiting response") | Copy Link |
| New | The supplier submitted — the card now shows their brand name and category | Accept |
The pills answer the question you'd otherwise ask by email: did they even open it? A request stuck on Pending never arrived or never got clicked; one on Viewed is being worked on or was abandoned mid-form — either way, you know which follow-up to send. Accepted requests leave the inbox, so the panel only ever shows work in progress.
When a card turns New, the submission is ready to review: the supplier's brand name and category sit right on the card. Click Accept and Alculator creates a new brand in your workspace from it. Every line the supplier entered becomes a SKU — product name, container size, pack format, and FOB per case.
The submission carries the supplier's costs, not their opinion of your economics. The imported brand is priced through distributor and retailer margins that belong to you — it arrives on standard margin defaults, and the moment you open it you can set the percentages your house actually runs. How brand-level margins and per-SKU overrides interact is covered in Setting Distributor & Retailer Margins.
After the import, the brand sits in your list like any other — searchable, editable, exportable. From there it behaves exactly as described in Managing Brands. If you're onboarding a supplier with a long book rather than a single brand, the CSV route in Importing Portfolios may be the better fit.
The form your link opens is free for the supplier — no account, no card, no trial clock. And answering you isn't throwaway work on their side: the supplier keeps a free copy of the pricing model they built while filling out your request. That matters for adoption. You're not asking a busy brand owner to do data entry for your benefit; you're handing them a working pricing model as a side effect of answering you. The supplier's view of the whole flow is in Responding to a Pricing Request.
Request Pricing is a Trade feature. The button is visible on the Brands page on every plan — on other plans it wears a Trade badge, and clicking it shows an upgrade prompt rather than creating a link. Trade is the plan built for distributors and importers: it includes pricing requests, portfolio import, and the largest team, on top of everything in the lower plans. The full comparison lives on the pricing page, and the distributor workflow as a whole is sketched on For Distributors.
One distinction worth keeping straight: request links are not share links. A share link publishes a snapshot of pricing outward for someone to read; a request link collects pricing inward for you to import. Same one-URL simplicity, opposite direction.
One link out, one click in — supplier pricing that lands in your brand list already structured.
See Trade Plans →