NOTICE: This was moved from an existing discussion: Does Anixter Sell Direct To End Users? YES
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Of course, there is the consultant perspective here as well. We know from one current client that one of the distributors named in this article is not only selling equipment direct to them (for the express purpose stated by the client to cut out the integrator and the associated mark-up), but the distributor is laying out systems (design) which directly made our services (for fee) irrelevant. I was looking through the posts with interest in hopes of finding some specific cases of distributor design problems so that at least we could defend ourselves at little better. Our client is all smug about having saved a few bucks and not having had to pay the integrator mark-up or the consultant for a design. We can't compete with free, even though I suspect that the design effort was covered somewhere else in the costs. Unfortunately, it appears that there is very little justification (other than ethics) to prevent distributor direct selling to the end user. I will continue to monitor this post to try and identify whatever tangible downsides there are to such an arrangement, but I am having a hard time defending the results to my current client. I don't know if these distributors are carrying a full range of product lines, but I know that we as consultants have no such constraints and can look at the entire spectrum of products without having to be limited to what it is we might sell.