Is it cheaper to buy direct from the brand?

Each row is the same product, the same day, in stock at both a brand's own shop and at an independent retailer. Not a comparison of catalogues or of average price levels — the identical object, priced twice.

The size of the gap, as a percentage of the retailer's price (a positive number means the brand charges more):

The median of 0% is the whole story in one number: for the typical product, going direct changes nothing at all.

“Cut out the middleman” is a rule of thumb borrowed from a different kind of trade. It assumes the retailer's margin is money the brand could hand back to you. In practice a brand that undercut its own retailers would be competing with its distribution — the shops that carry its product, display it, and sell it to people who came in for something else. Brands protect that relationship, and the commonest way to protect it is to hold the same price everywhere.

That is exactly what the middle row of the table shows. 38.6% of these products cost the same to the cent at the brand and at a shop that has no connection to it. That is not competition arriving at the same answer; it is a floor.

Where a real gap exists, it more often favours the retailer, and the reason is mundane: a retailer can discount its own margin on a line it wants to clear, while the brand is pricing the product for every channel at once. The same pattern appears in which brands can be price-compared at all — enforced pricing is common enough that finding the same number at three shops tells you less than it appears to.

• Brand ownership is inferred, not verified. A shop whose dominant brand matches its domain is treated as that brand's own. A retailer that writes its own name in the vendor field would be misclassified, and we use the heuristic only for counting and price comparison.
• Prices only. Warranty, colour range, size range and support are real reasons to buy direct and none of them is measurable from a catalogue.
• No shipping. Asking prices before shipping, tax and checkout codes. Shipping is where a direct purchase often wins or loses, and we do not read it.
• Only products in stock at both are compared. A brand that is cheaper but sold out is not an option, and counting it would flatter the wrong side.
• Pairs more than four times apart are discarded as matching errors rather than published as extraordinary gaps.

A sample of the 222 shops in the corpus whose dominant brand is also their domain name. No list is maintained by hand — it is derived at every sweep, so it follows the corpus without anyone thinking about it.

The heuristic is deliberately crude, and its failure mode is worth naming. A shop that writes its own trading name into the vendor field of every product it sells — as several large retailers do — looks from the outside exactly like a brand selling its own goods. We would classify it as a brand, and it would sit on the wrong side of the comparison above.

That is tolerable here because the measurement is a count over hundreds of products, not a verdict about any one shop, and because a misclassification pushes the result towards “no difference” rather than towards our conclusion. It would not be tolerable on a page that named a shop as a manufacturer, so we do not write that page.

Is buying direct from the manufacturer cheaper?

On 1,185 products we can compare, the brand's own shop is cheaper 17.1% of the time and an independent retailer 44.2% of the time, with 38.6% identical. The common belief that cutting out the middleman saves money does not survive the measurement.

Why are so many prices identical?

That is what a minimum advertised price policy looks like from outside: the brand sets a floor its retailers advertise at, and its own shop sits at the same number. 38.6% of these pairs are identical to the cent, which is far too many to be coincidence.

Then why buy direct at all?

For reasons this site cannot measure and does not pretend to — warranty handling, full colour and size ranges, and support when something goes wrong. Our claim is narrow and only about money.

How do you know which shops belong to a brand?

We do not maintain a list. A shop whose dominant brand is also its domain name is treated as the brand's own — 222 of the shops we read qualify. It is a heuristic, it is stated as one, and it is used only for counting and price comparison, never to accuse anyone of anything.

Does this include shipping?

No. Asking prices only, before shipping, tax and any code at checkout — and shipping is exactly where a direct purchase can win or lose the comparison. We do not read shipping tables, so we do not claim to have measured them.