yeah compare a little small dealer to amazon
amazon has MUCH more buying power. They can (and do) dictate the pricing, much the same as walmart homerdepot, lowes, target, etc.
years ago I developed a fishing lure that works great here, apparently other areas too. Patented, marketed it to local retailers. To get a larger venue, I paid a company to try to sell it to walmart. You have to jump through hoops. In the process they try to negotiate you down and a lot of times below your cost, becoming reliant on volume alone. This is called mass marketing. There "is" some money in mass marketing but it requires investments to be made in order to become profitable.
In my case, I chose to stay small. Eventually most of the product was sold, and now marketed under a different brand. I kept some for myself and family
With that said, you'd think that small mom-and-pop outfits would be more expensive every time. Not always. Larger corporate dealerships (and sometimes you don't know if they are corporate until you just ask) have more buying power than smaller ones, but they also have higher bills to pay at the end of the month/quarter/year, so even though they buy cheaper, they sell for the same price as everyone else, to pay for their higher bills. That describes what I went through at a dealer I worked at.
Kinda off-topic but kubota is going the direction of deere, they are liking it when a small dealer is getting bought out and run by larger corporations and dealer chains. Deere did a lot of that stuff in the 1990's and 2000's, and continuing to do it today, and it "changes" the entire brand. Sometimes not for the good either. I got out while I could but still keep up to date with what's going on.
Corporate sucks!!
Kubota (and many other dealers/retailers) have something called MSRP. Manufacturer's suggested retail price. Messicks, as a generality, sells slightly below msrp. But they make it up on shipping so you end up paying about the same from them as you would at your local dealer. Pretty common among online retail outfits. They sell by price and then S&H makes it up. I did it too when I worked at the dealer, by direction of corporate. Their S&H budget was in the red, so I (we) had to hike it to cover "expenses"--which keep going up about every 3 months on average. UPS/Fedex/DHL/CCS/USPS don't work for free. A lot of times we had to hike the S&H costs to cover employee (or employeR) bonuses, and a what I did see a lot of was shipper rate hikes that would occur suddenly, after you quote a rate to a customer. You (as a dealer employee) usually lost money in those situations. Sometimes a few pennies but it adds up quickly with volume and trust me--corporate doesn't like to see lost money, whether it be a penny or a dollar, you're going to get a butt chewing!! The website is usually run by an outside entity and does not stay totally up-to-date, so when a customer would go to check out and I get the ticket on it to pull what they ordered, the actual shipping costs would be higher than what was charged, resulting in a S&H loss. Again usually not a lot of money but it adds up.
used to be that people would buy online and save the tax. Now that most places are charging tax for even online purchases, it's almost exactly the same cost to buy online as it is to buy local once it's all said and done. The difference is--convenience. We are a society of convenience, so if we don't have to get out of the easy chair to go pick up a part at the dealer, we will order it online and wait for it to show up at the front door. I know there's exceptions but that's a generality. Online retail outfits take full advantage of convenience, as I did when I was doing dealer work. With the pandemic, even more so as we've been conditioned to stay in, so when we needed a spark plug for a lawn mower, we'd just order it from amazon...pay a little more for it but we didn't have to leave the house.