There's No Universal Answer Here—And That's the Point
Every few months someone on my LinkedIn feed posts about switching office suppliers like they've found religion. "Just use Staples Advantage, problem solved." Or the opposite—"we cancelled ours, waste of money."
Both of those people are probably right. For their situation.
I'm an office administrator for a 120-person company. I manage all facilities and office supply ordering—roughly $180K annually across 6 vendors. I report to both operations and finance, which means I get it from both sides when something's over budget or when someone's stapler doesn't arrive in two days.
I've used Staples Advantage for about three years now. Some parts of it are genuinely great. Some parts are overkill for us. And I've watched smaller and larger companies approach the same platform very differently.
So here's what I've learned: whether Staples Advantage makes sense depends almost entirely on your office profile. Below are three scenarios. Find the one that sounds like you.
Scenario A: The Small Office (Under 50 People)
If you're running a 20-person shop, your supply needs are probably straightforward—printer paper, pens, coffee, the occasional weird request from someone who watched a productivity YouTube video.
Honestly? You can get by without a business account platform. Amazon Business or even a Costco run might cover 80% of what you need.
But here's where it can still make sense: if you're ordering specialty items on a recurring basis. For example, we print quarterly training manuals through Staples Advantage Simple Print. For a smaller office, you might only need this once or twice a year—but when you do, the difference between online printing and a local shop is real money.
Business card pricing comparison (500 cards, 14pt cardstock, double-sided, standard 5–7 day turnaround):
- Budget tier: $20–35
- Mid-range: $35–60
- Premium (thick stock, coatings): $60–120
Based on publicly listed prices, January 2025. Prices exclude shipping; verify current rates.
Simple Print sits in that mid-range and saved us about $200 per quarterly run vs. our old local printer. For a small office doing this twice a year, that's $400—not nothing, but not transformative either.
Also, if you're shipping anything—product samples, HR documents, whatever—Staples Advantage poly mailers are cheaper per unit than what I've found at retail. But you have to buy in bulk. A 20-person office might not burn through 500 poly mailers in a year.
My honest take for small offices: Don't open an account just for convenience. Open one if you have at least two recurring specialty needs (printing, bulk mailers, branded materials). Otherwise, the overhead isn't worth it.
Scenario B: The Mid-Size Office (50–300 People)
This is where I live. And this is where Staples Advantage actually earns its keep—if you use it right.
At 120 people, we go through roughly 40–50 cases of printer paper per year. That's not a typo. Between legal, marketing, finance, and the people who print emails before reading them, paper is our #1 consumable.
The pricing advantage on bulk printer paper through Staples Advantage is maybe 8–12% below what we were paying through our old regional supplier. I don't have hard data on industry-wide pricing, but based on our own three-year order history, that's been consistent.
Where it gets interesting is the consolidation effect.
When I took over purchasing in 2021, we had 6 vendors: one for paper, one for office supplies, one for furniture, one for printing, one for packaging, and one for breakroom stuff. Managing that was a part-time job on top of my actual job.
Staples Advantage absorbed four of those six. That's not just about saving money—it's about saving time. I estimate I got back 4–6 hours per month, mostly from not chasing invoices and returns across different portals.
Plus, the buy vs rent calculator they have for office furniture is genuinely useful. We were about to buy 15 standing desks outright. Ran the numbers, and leasing made more sense given our 3-year lease on the building. Saved us about $4K in upfront capital that finance was happy to redeploy elsewhere.
The catch: You need someone to actually manage the account. If nobody owns this, you'll end up with duplicated orders, unused inventory, and a finance team that hates you.
Scenario C: The Large or Multi-Location Office (300+ People)
I've never managed an office this size, so I can only speak to what I've observed from peers at larger companies.
At this scale, Staples Advantage Business Advantage (the enterprise tier) becomes less about product discounts and more about procurement workflow. Approval chains, cost center coding, budget dashboards—things that matter when you're processing 500+ orders a month.
One colleague at a 600-person company told me they cut their PO processing time from 5 days to 2 days after integrating Staples Advantage with their ERP. That's a real operational win.
But I've also heard complaints. At that size, you lose flexibility. You can't just have someone run to Office Depot when you need 20 Yeti lunch boxes for a last-minute employee appreciation event. Everything has to go through the system.
The trade-off: Control and visibility vs. speed and flexibility.
How to Figure Out Which Scenario You're In
Here's a simple gut check. Answer these three questions:
- How many vendors do you currently manage for office supplies? If it's 1–2, you probably don't need Staples Advantage. If it's 4+, you probably do.
- Do you have at least one recurring specialty need? (Printing, bulk packaging, branded materials, furniture refresh cycles.) If yes, the platform starts paying for itself. If no, you're paying for features you won't use.
- Does someone own this process? If the answer is "whoever remembers to order stuff," fix that first. A platform won't solve a process problem—it'll just make the mess more organized.
Look, I'm not here to tell you Staples Advantage is the answer for everyone. It's not. For a 15-person startup, it's probably overkill. For a 500-person company with no procurement process, it's also not going to fix that.
But for the middle—where I live—it's been a net positive. Not because the prices are dramatically better, but because the consolidation and workflow improvements are real. I'm not gonna pretend I have hard data on every category, because I don't. What I can say anecdotally is that our invoice disputes dropped by about 70% after consolidating, and that alone was worth the switch.
Your mileage may vary. But now at least you know what to check before you decide.
Leave a Reply