Firejo
Member
Just buy it at the cheaper price.
The whole "AB Distributor System" exists only to charge a high price for very little benefit.
I could not disagree more. My company sells through AB distribution and while there are always exceptions, typically the distributor works very hard to not only make the sale but to make sure the application is valid and will actually do what it was intended to do. Rockwell holds their distributors to a very high standard and you get what you pay for. If you want it cheap then go elsewhere, but in the 20+ years I've been in the Industrial Automation world I've learned "cheap comes out expensive" almost every time.
Again, there are always exceptions out there but in general you are paying for high quality work and expertise.
As to "non-affiliated" automation equipment re-sellers, the company that I used to work for had several "encounters" with one of them (to be fair it wasn't ***********). They claim to be a factory authorized re-seller of our equipment and that they had "new stock" on the shelf. The problem was they weren't a factory authorized re-seller and had never purchased anything from us (so they couldn't possibly have new stock on the shelf). When we contacted them and told them to stop making the claims they basically said no. We looked into legal action but the cost was prohibitive. We also had a few occasions where someone would come to us looking for help with a product they bought from "them" and if it was hardware related (as apposed to configuration and/or application help) we had to decline to help. Again, cheap comes out expensive.
Just my 2 cents.