Is Staples Advantage Worth It? A Procurement Manager’s Breakdown for 2025

There's no single answer—it depends on how you buy

If you've ever Googled "Staples Advantage shipping boxes" or "Staples Advantage note books" looking for a definitive yes-or-no on whether the program saves money, you've probably noticed the reviews are all over the map. Some procurement folks swear by it. Others call it overpriced.

Here's the thing: they're both right. Because whether Staples Advantage (now rolled into the broader Staples Business Advantage) is a good deal depends entirely on how your company buys office supplies. I've been managing procurement for a mid-size tech company (about 200 employees) for over six years, tracking around $180,000 in cumulative office spending. After comparing quotes, tracking hidden fees, and testing different setups, here's what I've learned.

I'll break this down into three common scenarios. Find yours.

Scenario A: You have a dedicated procurement or admin person placing orders

Staples Advantage is probably a strong option

If your company has someone (full-time or part-time) whose job includes managing office supply orders, Staples Advantage's centralized account structure is genuinely useful. You get:

• Custom approval workflows
• Spend reporting per department
• Consolidated monthly invoicing
• Account-manager support for reorders

In this setup, the platform's real value isn't in per-item pricing (which is competitive but rarely the absolute lowest). It's in process efficiency. When I audited our 2023 spending, I found that our ordering process—chasing down requests, getting approvals, placing individual orders—cost about 4.5 hours per week. That's roughly $7,200 in labor annually at our average admin salary. Shifting to a centralized platform cut that by about 60%.

(There's something satisfying about opening a consolidated invoice and seeing all department spend in one place. After years of messy spreadsheets, that's a genuine win.)

Things to watch for:

• Minimum order thresholds for free shipping ($50 for most basics, but some bulk items differ)
• Account-manager quality varies by territory (we've had two—one excellent, one mediocre)
• Some pricing is negotiated—if you don't ask for a better rate, you'll get the default

Scenario B: Employees order supplies ad-hoc with individual credit cards

Staples Advantage can actually cost you more

Most buyers focus on per-unit pricing and completely miss setup fees, minimum-order penalties, and shipping that can add 30–50% to the total. If your employees are ordering one ream of paper here, a box of pens there, with personal cards or scattered POs, Staples Advantage's contract pricing may not kick in. You end up paying retail—which is fine, but not necessarily better than Amazon or Office Depot.

Here's the blind spot: incremental shipping. If each employee places their own order, you're paying $10–15 in shipping per order. Over a year, for a 50-person team ordering twice a month, that's $12,000–18,000 in shipping alone. (This is the kind of thing you don't see until you run a procurement audit—which I did in Q2 2024.)

In this scenario, you have two better options:

1. Implement a centralized ordering process (even a simple one—one person collects requests and places a single weekly order)
2. Use Staples Advantage but enforce minimum order size to hit free shipping thresholds

(Part of me wants to say everyone should centralize ordering. Another part knows that for small companies—10–15 people—it can add bureaucracy without much benefit. If you're small and orders are infrequent, retail pricing is fine.)

Scenario C: Your team is remote or hybrid

Staples Advantage's flexibility is a real asset—if you manage it right

For remote teams, the ability to ship directly to employee home offices is a big deal. Staples Advantage can set up address lists per employee, which saves the logistics of receiving bulk orders and redistributing them. This is a clear advantage over local office supply stores or bulk-only suppliers.

But—and this is a big but—shipping to individual addresses on small orders means no economy of scale. That $10–15 per shipment adds up fast. Our company has about 30 remote employees. When we first set this up (circa 2021), we didn't think about the shipping math. I had mixed feelings about the program until we ran the numbers: shipping costs were eating 22% of our supply budget. We fixed it by:

• Setting a minimum order threshold per remote worker ($75/month)
• Quarterly bulk shipments to regional hubs for team leads to distribute
• Using slower (free) shipping on non-urgent items

That saved us roughly $4,200 annually—about 17% of our office supply budget. (Surprise, surprise: shipping, not product cost, was the real savings opportunity.)

How to tell which scenario you're in

Here's a quick self-diagnostic. Answer honestly:

• Do you have someone who regularly places and tracks office supply orders? → You're in Scenario A.
• Do employees use personal cards to order supplies as needed? → You're in Scenario B.
• Are at least 30% of your team working remotely? → You're in Scenario C (or a hybrid of A and C).

Most companies are hybrids. We were Scenario A + C. The key is to know which costs you're optimizing for. If your biggest pain point is process time and manual approvals, Staples Advantage pays for itself in labor savings. If your biggest pain point is per-unit cost, you might do just as well with competitive bids from local suppliers or Amazon Business.

The bottom line: Staples Advantage is a strong no-brainer for Scenario A, a potential money pit for Scenario B, and a tool that requires active management for Scenario C. Take it from someone who's tracked every invoice for over six years—knowing your scenario is the real game-changer.

Pricing as of March 2025; verify current rates. These observations are based on my experience managing one company's procurement—your mileage may vary.

Author's note: I wrote this because I kept seeing generic advice online about Staples Advantage. One size doesn't fit all, and pretending otherwise is how companies waste money. If you're on the fence, run a three-month test with clear tracking. That's the only way to know for sure.