A customer rang to ask why your price was higher than the same machine online

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17 August 2026 · Aston Gapes · about 6 minutes
Part of Get found

Picture a phone call that happens somewhere in Australian manufacturing most weeks.

A customer rings, mildly annoyed. He has been quoted for one of your machines and he has found the same machine online for four hundred dollars less. He would like to know why your price is higher. He is polite about it, but the question underneath is are you having a go at me.

You did not set that price. You have never met the company charging it. And the machine he found is yours.

The row of products above the results

Search a specific piece of equipment — a chain hoist, a bin tipper, a welding plant — and Google often puts a row of products across the top of the page, with photographs and prices, above the ordinary blue links. It is built from retailer product feeds. It is also the first thing a buyer's eye lands on, and for a lot of them it is the only thing they look at.

We check that row for every manufacturer we research, and the manufacturer is very often not in it. Their machine is. Listed by two or three resellers, at prices the manufacturer did not set, with the click going somewhere else.

In one case we found a specific model listed by name and by price, sold through a trading company, while the business that designs and builds that model appeared nowhere on the page. In another, a specialist in one brand of hoist was absent while a competitor listed that same brand at a fixed price, above them.

Stop. Before you get angry, answer one question.

Do you sell direct, or through dealers? Because the same picture means opposite things, and we got this wrong once before we learned to ask first.

We wrote up a manufacturer's absence from that row as resellers stealing their sales. They were a wholesale manufacturer. The retailers listed above them were their own customers, doing precisely what their distribution agreement asks them to do. We had described their business model back to them as a failure, which is a fast way to be ignored and fair enough too.

Telling which one you are looking at takes half a minute. A cart, prices and a checkout means direct. A store locator, a "where to buy" page or a trade login means wholesale.

If you sell direct and you are absent, that is a real gap: buyers are seeing a price for your product, set by somebody who did not make it, and you are not in the comparison at all. If you wholesale and you are absent, that is correct and not a problem. You do not sell to consumers. If you wholesale and your dealers are listed, that is the channel working, which is the system doing its job.

But a wholesaler is not off the hook

This is the part that surprises people, because nobody in the business is watching for it.

Sellers you never authorised turn up in that row. We have found a manufacturer's product listed second-hand by a pawn chain, sitting in the same row as their authorised dealers, with the same photograph.

Your own dealers disagree with each other on price, in public. A hundred dollars between two authorised sellers of the same item, side by side, visible to every buyer and to both dealers. That is a conversation you would much rather have before they do.

And you can count share of the row. If your brand has ten listings, a competitor has eight and another has one, that is a live read on dealer sell-through — a number a wholesaler cares about as much as anybody, available for free, updated daily, and almost never looked at.

The version of this that stops people mid-sentence

Google now writes a summary at the top of many searches and cites the sources it treats as authoritative. We have watched it cite a manufacturer three times by name, as the authority on a compliance question, with that same manufacturer absent from the row of priced products directly above their own result.

Google's own summary points at you first, and the buyer still sees someone else's price first. That is not a ranking problem. It is a merchandising one, and it is fixable.

Two minutes, then

Search the exact product you make, the way a buyer would type it, with your ad blocker off. Look at the row of priced products. Count how many are yours, how many belong to your dealers, and how many are neither. Note the spread between the highest and lowest price on your own machine. Read the summary at the top and see whose name is in it.

Then decide whether the man on the phone was really complaining about your price.