How to Filter Promotional Products by Budget, Quantity and Date

You can narrow our range by price and budget, minimum quantity, colour, product characteristics and delivery date, so you go straight to the products that fit what you can spend and arrive in time. If you need 500 bottles under £4 each by the 12th, that's a handful of filters rather than forty product pages.

Hotline Promotional Products stocks over 2,000 branded products. That's genuinely useful when you know what you want and a hindrance when you don't, which is why we rebuilt the filters around the three things that actually decide a merchandise order: the money, the number of people and the date.

Start with the constraint you can't move

Most people shop for merchandise the way they'd shop for anything else, by finding something they like and then checking whether they can have it. With branded products that wastes time, because the thing most likely to rule an item out is rarely the one you looked at first.

So work the other way round. If your budget is signed off and fixed, filter by price and let the product choice follow from what's affordable. If your headcount is set and low, filter by quantity, because minimum order quantities will remove more options than price does. If your event date is booked and everything else is flexible, start with the date.

Whichever of those three you genuinely cannot change is the one to lead with.

Filtering by budget

Divide your total budget by the number of people you're giving to. That gives you your cost per head, which is the number the price filter wants.

If you have £2,000 and 500 attendees, your ceiling is £4 per unit. Set the filter to £4 and the range narrows to what you can actually afford, before you fall for something at £9 and have to have an awkward conversation about it.

One thing that catches people out is that the price per unit falls as the quantity rises. The setup cost for a print run is much the same whether you're doing 50 units or 5,000, so the more units you spread it across, the less each one costs. If you're sitting just below a quantity break, ordering slightly more sometimes costs less in total, so it's worth checking the price at two quantities before you settle.

For a sense of the spread, branded Love Hearts start at £0.49 a roll, a canvas tote at £2.55, a hoodie at £9.21 and a Parker IM Core Rollerball at £27.81, with a great deal in between and above.

Filtering by quantity

Minimum order quantities are set per product rather than as a blanket policy, and they vary far more than most people expect.

If you're ordering for a team of 10, filtering by quantity clears out everything you can't order at your size before you get attached to one of them. It's also worth knowing that low minimums exist at both ends of the price range, so a small order doesn't automatically mean a cheap product.

Filtering by delivery date

Set the date you need your merchandise by and the range narrows to products that can reach you in time. This matters more than it sounds, because dispatch across our range runs from 5 days to 22.

There's more on that in shopping by delivery date. Every product then shows its own guaranteed delivery date, so you can confirm before you order.

A worked example: 500 bottles, under £4, by the 12th

Say you need 500 water bottles, under £4 each, for a conference on the 12th of next month.

1. Open the metal sports bottles category, which holds 87 products.
2. Filter to the bottle style you want.
3. Set the quantity to 500, which clears out anything with a higher minimum and shows you the price at that volume rather than at the minimum. Set the delivery date to the 12th.

What's left is a list where every product fits the budget, meets the quantity and arrives in time. From there you're choosing on the thing that should decide it, which is whether your delegates will actually keep the bottle.

The whole sequence takes about a minute, and it replaces the version of this job where you open fifteen product pages and write the prices on a notepad.