Celebrating 85 Years

Trade Service , a Trimble Company since 2013, is celebrating its 85th year providing key product and pricing data, submittal information and e-commerce content to the construction, office products, and automotive industries. Since 1931, Trade Service has transformed the pricing services industry from simple printed pricing books to comprehensive content for the industry including: product and pricing data integrated into estimating software; robust content for distributors that helps automate business processes like inventory management and invoicing; and specialized software that assists in submittal management. Today over 20,000 contractor, distributor and manufacturer clients across North America rely on Trade Service.

A Brief Timeline of Evolution of Product and Pricing Services

After two decades of serving just contractors, the founder, Bill Gudie, partnered with Charles G. Pyle in 1951 to broaden the scope of the company to serve electrical distributors. Another decade later the pair used the same business principles in the United Kingdom to form Trade Service Luckins. Luckins, also part of the Trimble family is the market leader in the U.K. today.

With the introduction of computers in the 1970s Trade Service was able to revolutionize the way pricing updates were managed moving away from manually updating individual pieces to batch updates via disks allowing for quicker and more precise updates. In 2008, Trade Service introduced TRA-SER, an online parts pricing system so that now millions of items are updated on a weekly basis - estimating and distributor ERP business systems are constantly up-to-date, helping contractors win more bids and distributors be more efficient.

2012 brought the introduction of Submittal Manager, the first specialized submittal software for the electrical and plumbing industry which reduces the time it takes to create a submittal in half.

Today the company is focused on helping distributors stay competitive in the realm of e-commerce, again using their vast knowledge to engineer distributors’ systems so that accurate, robust content gets their online stores selling quickly.