A lower per-unit price at a supplier's minimum order quantity isn't automatically the better deal — it ties up more cash and sits in inventory longer. Enter your numbers to see both sides of the trade.
MOQ calculator
Compare against a smaller order (optional)
A supplier offering 2,000 units at $4.20 instead of 500 units at $5.10 looks like a straightforward win — 18% off per unit. But it also means $8,400 in cash instead of $2,550, and if you're selling 350 units a month, that's 5.7 months of inventory sitting in a warehouse instead of 1.4. The per-unit saving is real; so is the cash and the risk that comes with holding it that long.
What that cash could otherwise be doing matters here. Tied up in inventory, it isn't available for ad spend, other SKUs, or just runway — and if the product doesn't sell as fast as planned, has a shelf life, or the design changes before it sells through, a large MOQ order is the more expensive mistake to have made, discount or not. There's no universal right answer; it depends on your cash position, how confident the sales forecast is, and whether storage and time value of money outweigh the per-unit saving for your specific numbers.
Landed cost — not just the supplier's quoted unit price — is the number that actually belongs in this comparison, since freight and duty don't scale down proportionally at smaller order sizes either. Run both quantities through the landed cost calculator before comparing them here.