Pricing for bulk quantities tends to be much more difficult to find. Here are a few reasons:
- Prices can change quickly depending on many factors, like quality, location, time of year, industry conditions, and other variables.
- Companies offering bulk quantities of chemicals want to know who their potential customers are.
- Chemical pricing information can be very valuable to a company, so it's often not free, or if available not widely published.
When searching for bulk pricing for a chemical or chemicals, we recommend starting with business databases. Below are some business databases that contain articles on the chemical industry, and may occasionally include market information like pricing. Try searching using the name of the chemical you are looking for AND price, or just by the name of the chemical.
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Business Source Complete This link opens in a new windowFull-text coverage plus indexing and abstracts for the most important scholarly business journals, including Harvard Business Review.
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ABI/INFORM Trade & Industry This link opens in a new windowSearch more than 750 business periodicals and newsletters with a trade or industry focus. Provides users with the latest industry news, product and competitive information, marketing trends, and a wide variety of other topics. Contains publications on every major industry, including finance, insurance, transportation, construction, and many more.
If you don't find pricing in one of the business databases, start searching individual chemical industry trade journals and magazines.
Next, try looking for web sources. The list below is a great place to start, but try a basic web search, too.
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ICIS Static Price List
Try this site for historical pricing for some common chemicals. These prices came from issues of ICIS Chemical Business published from 2006-2008.
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USGS Minerals Information
Try searching the USGS for information on mineral processing, including some pricing information.
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ICIS
Try searching for your chemical on the site of this vendor of chemical industry information. We cannot buy the full reports, but you may find the information you need in the samples.
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IHS
Like ICIS, IHS is a vendor of chemical industry information. We cannot buy the full reports, but you may find the information that you need in the samples.
Finally, if you can only find outdated prices consider estimating using an inflation factor. You can find inflation factors in trade magazines, like "Chemical Engineering" to help you make a more accurate estimate.
C=current pricing, Cyr=previous year's pricing, i=inflation factor, Δt=time