I'm Considering Switching Suppliers to Save 8% on Raw Materials — How Do I Include Shipping, MOQ, Retesting and Quality Differences Before Calculating the Real Saving?

What 8% is worth, and 8% of what

The first question to put to an 8% quote is which lines it covers. Almost no supplier switch moves everything. If the new supplier sells wax and fragrance oil but not vessels or wicks, the 8% applies to ₹146.92 of this candle rather than to all ₹223.62, and the saving is ₹11.75 rather than ₹17.89. That is a difference of ₹6.14 a candle before anything else has been counted, and it is the single most common way a switch disappoints. This page carries the generous reading — 8% off every material line — throughout, so that when the arithmetic lands somewhere well below 8% it cannot be blamed on a pessimistic starting point.

Here is the candle, stated in full so that everything downstream is checkable. The fill reading carried on this page is 200 g of wax plus 16 g of oil at 8% of wax weight, 216 g poured; fragrance load is a percentage of wax weight, which is how CSI product pages state it. The wax is Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 bought as the 5 kg pack, whose page gives a maximum load of 10% of total wax weight and 80–90°C as the working range for melting and pouring. The oil is Citrus Lemon, whose page gives a soy candle range of 6–10% of total wax weight and approximately 0% vanillin; the lower of the two published limits governs, and here both are 10%, so an 8% load sits inside both. The vessel is a Black Glossy Glass Jar, priced per piece out of the five-piece pack; its page states a 200 ml fill and dimensions of 8 cm by 7 cm, and this page neither converts millilitres to grams nor claims that any particular pour fits it. The wick is a Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1).

Freight, the deduction that most often swallows the whole quote

Delivery is charged in flat weight bands, on the stored packed weight of what you order rather than on the weight printed on the label. That is worth checking on any supplier, and the arithmetic is easy to do on CSI's own published bands, which serve here as a reference rather than as a comparison — this page does not know what the other supplier charges and will not guess. A 5 kg pack of Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 carries a stored packed weight of 6.0 kg and the cheapest published band covering it is ₹630.00 on Standard Shipping in September 2026; that pack makes 25 candles at 200 g, so it carries ₹25.20 a candle. The 10 kg pack at 11.0 kg is ₹1,200.00 on Standard Shipping across 50 candles, or ₹24.00 a candle. Four 10 kg packs together at 44.0 kg is ₹4,000.00 on Expedited Shipping across 200 candles, or ₹20.00 a candle.

Read the last row of that table against the three above it. At the pack sizes a maker of 200 candles a month actually orders, carrying the wax costs ₹20.00 to ₹25.20 a candle, while the entire 8% quote is worth ₹17.89. The two numbers are the same order of size. That is the whole argument of this section: a difference in delivered freight of a few rupees a candle is not a detail at the bottom of the page, it is the deciding term. Two suppliers whose rates differ by 8% and whose freight differs by ₹10.00 a candle are not 8% apart; on this candle they are 2.64% apart, and that is before the test batch.

Minimum order quantity: cash you cannot spend twice

Cheaper rates usually arrive attached to a minimum order quantity, and an MOQ does two things that a cost sheet does not naturally show. It converts working capital into stock, and it fixes how long you are married to a decision you have only tested once. Both are measurable without inventing a number. At 200 candles a month and 200 g of wax a candle you use 40.0 kg of wax a month, so any MOQ divided by 40.0 gives months of cover. The cash side is the MOQ multiplied by the new rate — here shown at ₹466.81 a kilogram, which is your own 8% applied to CSI's published ₹507.40, not a quote from anybody.

The column that matters is the third one. A 100 kg minimum is 2.5 months of wax at this volume, and it earns ₹8,944.80 of saving across those months — real money, and money you cannot touch until the wax is poured. If the new wax behaves differently in a Mumbai monsoon or a Nagpur summer, you find out in week two and you are holding 2.0 months of it. There is no rupee figure for that risk that this page could honestly print, so it is not in the table. Judge it in months of cover and in whether you could sell the stock on if the trial went badly.

What a requalification batch actually costs

This is the deduction makers most often leave out, usually because it feels like something they were going to do anyway. It is not. Changing a wax or a fragrance supplier means the wick size that worked is now a hypothesis, and the cure time that gave you your throw is a hypothesis too. General candle-making practice is to re-establish both before a new material reaches a paying customer: at least three wick options across the diameter you pour, at least two fragrance loads, replicated, cured for 14 to 21 days and burn-tested properly. On this store the Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 page states a maximum load of 10% of total wax weight, so a sensible pair is 8% and 10%; three wick options across two loads with two candles each is 12 candles.

₹4,779.14, then, of which ₹3,658.80 is consumables and delivery you can price today and ₹1,120.34 is the new material itself. Against a saving of ₹17.89 a candle that is 268 candles to break even — about 1.34 months at 200 candles a month, or ₹1.99 a candle if you spread it across a full year. Read that as good news, because it is: the test batch is the cheapest of the four deductions and the only one that ends. It is also the one that protects you from the other three, because a failed burn test before an MOQ is a bad afternoon and a failed burn test after one is a quarter's cash in a corner of the workshop.

Netting the 8% down to a number you can bank

Now put the deductions in one place. The requalification cost is known — ₹1.99 a candle spread across a year at 200 candles a month. The freight difference is not known here, because it depends on a rate only the other supplier can give you, so the table below runs it as a sensitivity across four values. MOQ cash and your own hours stay blank, as they must. What the table shows is how quickly an 8% headline stops being 8%.

The shape of that table is the answer to the question in the title. With freight unchanged the switch is worth ₹15.90 a candle, which is 7.11% — already below the headline, and that is before either blank row has a number in it. Let the new supplier's delivered cost be ₹5.00 a candle worse and the switch is 4.87%. Let it be ₹10.00 worse and it is 2.64%, at which point you have spent a month of your own evenings to move ₹14,155.90 a year. None of those outcomes says do not switch. They say get the delivered figure first, because that one number moves the answer more than the quote does.

One thing the table deliberately does not model, because a neighbouring page owns it: a difference in how many candles you have to throw away. If the new material rejects more often, the cost is not the material you wasted but the vessel, the wick, the fragrance and the hour that went with it, and that arithmetic deserves its own sheet. What belongs here is the fact that you will not know your new reject rate until the requalification batch has run, which is another reason to run it before the minimum order rather than after.

Doing this on your own quote

A closing caution about what this page has assumed. Every figure here holds the recipe constant — same 200 g of wax, same 16 g of oil at 8% of wax weight, same vessel, same wick — because a switch in which the product quietly changes is not a saving, it is a new product. Wastage is assumed at zero throughout, which is an assumption and not a measurement, so your real base cost sits above ₹223.62. And the new supplier's rate of ₹466.81 a kilogram exists only as your own 8% applied to a published CSI price, so that the arithmetic has something checkable under it. Replace it with the number on your quote and every figure on this page recomputes in the same shape.

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