SAN DIEGO, CA – June 30, 2010 – Trade Service announced today a milestone achievement of over 1,000 electrical contractors using Supplier Xchange, Trade Service’s offering that provides electrical distributors the ability to connect with their contractors and provide them with their pricing in real-time. 

Contractors can send a list of materials to Supplier Xchange, from their estimating program, where it is matched against their selected supplier’s inventory file.  Within seconds, their specific pricing is returned to them for direct import into their bid.  This capability significantly helps the contractor produce more competitive bids, potentially winning more of the jobs they bid on.

Currently, over 2,700 electrical distributor locations are supporting Supplier Xchange, and this number continues to grow.  “The strongest demand for Supplier Xchange came from contractors who needed a way to acquire a more realistic level of pricing that could be quickly accessed during bid preparation,” said Tod Moore, Sr. Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Trade Service.  “And we are pleased that the industry’s major estimating software providers have actively responded to this critical need for their clients by writing the programs to make it work within their applications.”

Todd McCormick, President of McCormick Systems, one of the industry’s leading estimating software companies states, “Supplier Xchange is a great response to a need that’s been growing over recent years, for a quicker, more accurate way to obtain bid pricing.  Traditional ‘factoring methods’ used with published industry pricing have served their purpose over the years, but it’s gotten increasingly difficult to come up with just the right multiplier that can give the estimator a sharp enough pencil to win the bid and still make a decent profit.  Supplier Xchange solves this problem.”

About Trade Service
Trade Service is the leading provider of standardized product and price information to the electrical, plumbing/PVF, HVACR, industrial MRO, and office products industries. Since 1931, the company has been the leader in content acquisition, aggregation, management, publishing, and distribution, offering a variety of products, services, and systems to meet the content needs of over 20,000 distributors, contractors, and government agencies. The range of solutions provided includes printed directories, electronic catalogs, pricing data for business system updating, and robust attributed content to fuel full-functioning Internet storefronts.  For more information, visit www.tradeservice.com.