Why some distributors ask for your own login

Look up a gun and you'll sometimes see a distributor row with no price and no quantity. It just says Carried and has a Sign up required button where the price should be.

That isn't a glitch. It's that distributor's rule, and we follow it.

The short version

Most distributors let us show their pricing and stock to any dealer on Project Parabellum. A few only share it with dealers who have an account with them. Davidson's and Lipsey's work that way today. The list can change as distributors update their terms.

For those distributors, we can tell you whether they carry an item, and that's all, until you connect your own login with them.

What you see before you connect

In your search results, a distributor like this shows:

• Its name
• Carried or Not Carried
• A Sign up required button where the price would be

No price, no quantity, no in-stock or out-of-stock. They also stay out of Restock Intelligence until you connect, and the API returns them without price, quantity or SKU.

"Carried" is still worth knowing. If you already have an account with that distributor, it tells you where to look. If you don't, it tells you whether opening one would have covered this gun.

What changes after you connect

Sign up required explains how to get a login with that distributor. Once you have one, go to Settings and open the Distributors tab. Find the distributor under Available Distributors and enter the login you already use on their site.

Use Test Connection to check it works, then Save Configuration.

From then on, that distributor's rows show up like any other, with a Your Price badge. That's your price, pulled from your account with them.

Why we do it this way

We could have looked for a way around it. We didn't, for two reasons.

The first is that it's their data. These distributors have decided their pricing is for their own customers. When we sign up to carry a distributor's feed, we agree to their terms, and a feed we'd lose by breaking those terms is no use to anyone.

The second is that your price is more useful than a list price anyway. A standard price that isn't what you'd actually pay makes the comparison worse, not better.

What happens to your login

Your distributor login is only used to pull your own pricing and stock from that distributor. We never share it with other dealers or anyone outside Project Parabellum, and your pricing is only ever shown to you. A small number of our administrators can see it when they're helping you set up or fix a connection.

You can remove it any time. Open the distributor under Connected Distributors and click Delete. That deletes the saved login, and the distributor goes back to showing only whether it carries an item.

Try it

Connecting distributors is included with Pro and Pro+. If you have an account with a distributor that shows Sign up required, connect it and look something up again.

Not a member yet? Try the full Pro+ plan free for 7 days. No credit card needed until your trial ends.