The Industrial Automation Parts Pricing Report

Finding 1

The same part number sells at 3.5× apart

Take one exact catalog number, with sibling variants and accessories excluded, listed by at least five sellers. The median gap between the highest and the lowest asking price is 3.5×. That gap is larger than 2× for 83% of the parts we verified, larger than 3× for 60%, and larger than 5× for 28%. In practice this means the first price you find for a part tells you very little about what the rest of the market charges for it. The spread is not a marketplace artifact either: leave out eBay, Amazon and similar entirely, and the median spread across the same parts is still 3.1×.

A concrete example: the Allen-Bradley 1769-L32E is listed by 25 sellers right now, from $148 to $1,479, with a market median of $460. Same box, same catalog number. More examples, each linking to the live seller list:

Spreads compare deduplicated per-seller lowest prices, after outlier removal. The methodology page has the full filter chain.

Finding 2

The typical quote is 107% above the market low

The spread from finding 1 is not caused by a single outlier at the top. Take the middle seller on each verified part: that seller asks a median 107% above the lowest price on the market for the same part. In other words, a buyer who requests one quote and accepts it pays, in the typical case, about double what the market low would have been.

In dollars: the median verified part carries $468 between its lowest and highest asking price.

Finding 3

You usually cannot tell what you are buying

Of the 19,488 listings behind the verified set, 82% state no condition at all. For most industrial parts listings the buyer is simply not told whether the quote is for a new, used, refurbished or new-old-stock unit. The listings that do state a condition split roughly evenly between "new" and "used". Where both conditions are explicitly listed for the same part, used units ask a median 85% of the new price, with wide spread around that median. These are asking prices; whether sellers get them is not visible in listings data.

How much of the spread from finding 1 is really condition in disguise? We ran two checks. Excluding the listings that explicitly say "used" barely moves the numbers, but that is a weak test when 82% state nothing. The stronger test: keep only listings explicitly marked new, and the median spread drops from 3.5× to 1.7× (measurable on the 174 parts with at least three such listings). Read that both ways. A real part of the headline spread is condition that sellers do not state. And even between explicitly new units, the same part still sells at 1.7× apart.

Back to the 1769-L32E from finding 1: of the 25 sellers listing it, 15 do not say what condition the unit is in. A buyer comparing those 25 prices is comparing 25 unknowns.

Finding 4

Marketplaces undercut the specialists

On the 884 parts listed on both channels, the median marketplace price (eBay, Amazon and similar) sits 17% below the median specialist-distributor price, and the marketplace is the cheaper channel for 69% of those parts. One caveat belongs next to this number: condition disclosure is weakest on marketplaces, so part of that discount likely reflects unstated used stock.

An example with both channels well represented: the Keyence SR-1000.

That is $437 difference per unit, on the exact same catalog number.

Finding 5

When the manufacturer stops, prices go wild

Discontinued does not mean unavailable. Our lifecycle data currently covers Rockwell Automation's catalog, so this finding is about Allen-Bradley parts specifically. The 118 officially discontinued Allen-Bradley parts in our verified set are still traded by a median of 8 sellers each. What does change is the price: their median spread is 4.8×, against 3.2× for Allen-Bradley parts the manufacturer still sells. Once the manufacturer stops publishing a list price, the market loses its anchor and the gaps widen.

Smallest sample in this report (118 discontinued vs 153 active parts with a confirmed lifecycle status), and limited to one manufacturer; treat the exact ratio with care, the direction is clear. Lifecycle status sourced from Rockwell Automation's catalog.

Finding 6

Allen-Bradley and Fanuc show the widest median spreads