A Candle Jar Is Much Cheaper in a 500-Piece Quantity — How Do I Calculate Whether the Savings Justify Locking Up Inventory?

First check: cheaper at 500, or already at 50?

Before any holding-cost maths, check which quantity you are really comparing against. A price list that runs 5, 50, 100, 500 invites you to compare the 500 price with the 5 price. The honest comparison is with the smallest quantity that already gets the same or nearly the same price. Here is what that looks like on CSI's own container listings on 26 September 2026.

Three lessons from our own list. The Salsa clear jar is much cheaper in quantity (26.5% less per jar) but the step is at 50: buying 500 at once earns nothing that buying 50 at a time does not, and it ties up ten times the cash. The Mini jar's lowest price comes at 100. And of CSI's container listings, only Tea Lights Aluminium has a price that applies at 500 itself, worth ₹236.00 over five packs of 100. Most CSI jar listings (including the Clear 150 g and Matte 200 ml families) are flat per jar, so there is no bulk saving to weigh at all.

The calculation: one saving, four costs

Once you have an honest comparison, say a quote at your usual quantity and a quote at 500, the decision is one line of arithmetic with five terms.

Net gain = saving − cost of money − storage and handling losses − unused jars − (space and attention).

The saving

(Price per jar at your usual quantity − price per jar at 500) × 500. This is the number on the quote, and the only term that is certain. Note it assumes you use all 500; any jar you never use earns no saving and costs its full price.

Cost of money

Paying for 500 now instead of 100 every few weeks leaves extra jars on your shelf for months. Each rupee in them could have paid a supplier, cleared a loan or sat in the bank. Price it as: extra jars on hand in each month × price per jar × your monthly cost of money, added up over the months. If you use jars at a steady rate, the extra stock falls month by month, so the sum is roughly half the extra jars × price × months × rate. Your cost of money is yours to choose: the interest on a loan or overdraft, or what the cash earns elsewhere. We use an illustrative 1.5% a month.

Storage and handling losses

Glass that sits for months gets moved: cartons restacked, jars pulled for a test, a box dropped. Some jars get chipped or lost. There is no published figure for this and CSI has none; we use 1% of the bulk jars as a planning judgement. If your storage is a dry, quiet shelf nobody touches, it will be lower; if it is a corner of the workshop, higher.

Unused jars

The large one. If you change jar, drop the design, rebrand or simply sell less than you planned, the jars left over earn nothing. In the harsh case they are worth zero; in a kinder case you sell them on at a loss or use them in another line. This term is why sell-through time matters more than the discount.

Space and attention

Five hundred jars take a corner, need inspecting on arrival, and have to be kept dry and away from traffic. Hard to price, easy to underestimate. If you rent space by area, put a number on it; if not, at least note it.

Worked example: ₹60.00 at 100 against ₹48.00 at 500

Suppose a supplier quotes a jar at ₹60.00 each for 100 and ₹48.00 each for 500, 20.0% less. These are illustrative inputs, not CSI prices. You use 50 of this jar a month and would otherwise buy 100 every two months (₹6,000.00 each time). Buying 500 means ₹24,000.00 up front.

The headline saving of ₹6,000.00 shrinks to ₹4,302.00 once cost of money and storage are counted: still worth having. But the column on the right is the one to stare at. Stop using the jar at month 6, with 200 jars (₹9,600.00 at the bulk price) left on the shelf, and the bulk order has cost you ₹7,536.00 compared with buying 100 at a time. The saving is capped; the downside is not.

The sell-through test

Sell-through time is how long 500 jars last at your real usage: 500 ÷ jars used per month. At 50 a month, 10 months. At 25 a month, 20. It drives both the cost of money (longer on the shelf) and the risk of unused jars (more time for plans to change).

The quickest form of the test: divide what the bulk order really costs (bill, plus cost of money, plus storage) by your usual price per jar. That is how many jars you must use for the bulk order to pay. In the worked example it is about 428 jars, 86% of the 500, which at 50 a month is reached at about month 8.6. The diagram shows it as the point where the solid line crosses zero.

At 25 a month the picture changes. The cost of money grows (₹2,916.00 over 20 months), break-even moves out to about month 18.1, and at month 12 you are still ₹8,832.00 down. The same 20% discount that works for a maker selling 50 a month is a poor bet for one selling 25, unless they are very sure of the jar for the next year and a half.

Three real CSI price steps through the same maths

The worked quote above is illustrative. Here are three of the four in-stock CSI container listings whose listed prices really do step with quantity, run through the same thinking (the fourth, Colorful Votive Glass Jars – Black, steps only from a single jar at ₹35.40 to ₹31.86 in packs of 5 and 10).

Tea Lights Aluminium: a real 500 step, cheap to hold

Five hundred cups are ₹3,009.00 as one pack, or ₹3,245.00 as five packs of 100: a saving of ₹236.00, ₹0.47 a cup. Suppose you use 100 cups a month. Buying the 500 pack leaves extra cups on the shelf for five months: about 1,000 extra cup-months. At the 500-pack price and an illustrative 1.5% a month, that is ₹90.27 of cost of money. Aluminium cups do not shatter and a carton of them is light, so we allow nothing for storage losses beyond an occasional dent. Net: about ₹145.73, positive but small. If you use 100 cups a season rather than a month, buy 100.

200ml Salsa clear: much cheaper, but at 50

From 5 Pcs to 50 Pcs the price falls from ₹40.12 to ₹29.50 a jar, 26.5% less. Beyond 50, nothing changes: 500 jars cost ₹14,750.00 however you pack them. So the saving is available to anyone buying 50 at a time, and buying 500 adds only holding cost. The right move is to buy in 50s, as often as your production needs.

Mini Glass Jars: the step is at 100

Per jar, ₹25.96 at 5, ₹25.37 at 25, ₹23.60 at 50 and ₹21.24 at 100 (Black lids). There is no 500 pack; 500 jars as five packs of 100 are ₹10,620.00, the same per jar as a single 100. Buying 100 at a time captures the whole listed discount; 500 at once only ties up cash.

Run it on your own quote in six steps

If the jar passes, one more check before paying for 500: the glass itself. A sample from current stock, measured against your spec, is the first gate in the first-wholesale-order checklist. How much of the 500 to treat as buffer is a separate question, sized in the first-run hub; and whether to compare suppliers on landed cost rather than price per piece is Should I Compare Candle Jar Suppliers by Price per Piece or Landed Cost After GST, Freight, Breakage and Replacement?.

Where CSI's pack steps really are

Four container listings, chosen to show every kind of price structure on the store on 26 September 2026: a real 500 step, a step at 50, a step at 100, and flat pricing. Chosen on pack structure, stated details and stock, not on burn performance: CSI publishes no burn-down or breakage data for these containers.

Buying ahead of Diwali, 8 November 2026

Diwali falls on 8 November 2026, 43 days after these prices were checked. A festival is the one time when buying ahead can pass the sell-through test easily: if you will pour 300 jars for Diwali in the next six weeks, those jars leave your shelf within weeks, and the cost of money is small. The trap is buying 500 for a festival that needs 300 because the price is lower at 500. The 200 left after Diwali are ordinary stock that has to pass the test on its own, at your post-festival sales rate.

So size a festival order to the festival, plus the buffer from the buffer-percentage post, and treat anything beyond that as a separate bulk decision. Dispatch is from Pune; confirm delivery time on WhatsApp before counting on it.

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