How much does the same part cost across distributors? We tracked 100 MRO items for 90 days

Most procurement teams have a default distributor. It's the one already set up in the system, the one with the account rep on speed dial, the one nobody questions. The assumption underneath that habit is that prices across the major industrial distributors are roughly the same, so wherever you buy, you're paying about the market rate.

To put a number on that assumption, we pulled the publicly listed prices for 100 commonly purchased MRO items — safety supplies, cutting tools, fasteners, lubricants, and electrical components — and tracked each one across four major distributors every day for 90 days. Same manufacturer part numbers, same units, normalized so the comparison was apples to apples.

The gaps were wider than most buyers would guess.

The spread is bigger than most buyers assume

Across all 100 items, the average difference between the lowest and highest listed price was 31%. But the average hides the variation by category. Consumables with frequent restocking and lots of competing sellers — lubricants, safety supplies — showed the widest gaps. More commoditized hardware like fasteners stayed tighter.

A few examples

The pattern is easier to see at the item level. Here are five items from the set, with the lowest and highest price each was listed at during the 90-day window:

For more than half the parts we tracked, the cheapest source on any given day was not the distributor the team usually buys from.

Why the same part costs different amounts

None of this means one distributor is "the cheap one" and another is "the expensive one." Pricing moves constantly and item by item. A few things drive the spread:

• Promotions and clearance. Distributors run their own discounts on different items at different times. The deal rotates; the savings go to whoever happens to be watching that week.
• Stock and lead time. When one source runs low, its price often drifts up while a competitor with inventory stays flat.
• Catalog overlap. The same MPN sits in multiple catalogs with independently set list prices that were never meant to match.
• Pack size and unit confusion. A "lower" price is sometimes a smaller pack. Normalizing to a true per-unit cost changes the ranking more often than you'd expect.

What procurement teams can do about it

You don't need to chase every price on every item — that's the manual checking this is supposed to replace. The practical version is narrower:

• Identify the 20–50 items you reorder most often. That short list is where spread turns into real money.
• Compare on a normalized per-unit basis, not the headline price, so pack-size differences don't fool the ranking.
• Set a target price per item and let an alert tell you when any source drops below it — instead of checking sites by hand.
• Time larger orders against the price history rather than ordering the day the requisition lands.