[kayhi]

Our start up has been tackling this space of over priced chemicals and supplies for the past four years. We've worked with the majority of the DIYBio labs in the USA.

We've taken the approach of working with small manufacturers that already make products that are repackaged and marked up more than 10x.

John (author) is right that there is a huge need for more affordable reagents especially recombinant protein.

[pcrh]

This seems to be an area for disruptive approaches. I think one of the problems is for labs to find the cheaper suppliers who produce quality reagents. Most times such suppliers will be producing only a few reagents and so can't afford to have the markets presence of someone like VWR, Fisher or Sigma.

Perhaps an ebay-like marketplace with user feedback would be the way to go?

[kayhi]

You're on the right track!

We've actually had extremely few issues with quality (much less than 1%). I've personally used many of our manufacturers in research myself, which helped at the start.

There are start ups collecting user feedback on supplies and we used to have products reviews, but we've run into issues from large competitors making up fictitious reviews (reviews of products we've never sold, etc.)

Right, many manufacturers can only produce 5-10 items at scale and do not have the sales force for any market presence. We are helping them by aggregating their products (currently at 45,000+) to compete with VWR, Fisher and Sigma.

The sad part (why this area needs help) is there is significant savings ordering through us on the exact same item such as:

Greiner CELLSTAR® serological pipette, 10 mL $27 v. $106.60

http://store.p212121.com/serological-pipettes/ http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/sigma/p7615?lang...

Part of the reason that these pricing issues exist is that many universities negotiate from list price instead of absolute price.

For example, give us 40% off of list price instead of asking how much does this actually cost. Fisher will then have insanely high list prices and accounting thinks it is a win while researchers get burned. Researchers can go around purchasing, but often this requires additional paperwork.

Here is a section from a 48 university pool in Ohio, request for proposal asking for percent off of list price (not actual price): https://www.evernote.com/shard/s32/sh/cada2b94-2214-44e9-8d8...

[Thriptic]

Link us please

[kayhi]

http://store.p212121.com/