Neil from Messick's here. Today is Three-Minute Thursday. Today's Three-Minute Thursday, we're going to have a short conversation about amazon.com. What kind of things might be good to buy there and what things you might want to avoid.
Many, many people buy a lot of things on Amazon. My wife doesn't watch these videos, so I can tell you that I think half the things that come into our house are delivered by the FedEx guy from Amazon. It is a place that a lot of people go to shop, and in the case of hers, she often will blindly buy things off of there because of trust in that marketplace and its pricing. I'm here to tell you that oftentimes, I think that trust is misfounded when you get into certain kinds of products that are on there. Can be really good for things like toys and clothing and that kind of stuff, that's predominantly a lot of the things that we sell there. We're actually a fairly big retailer on there, and we list a lot of items on there and get a fair amount of business from it. It's a good, profitable place to be.
When you get into some unique things, you run into some situations where the pricing on there often is not very good and in some ways, downright terrible. If you look through all these bins back through here, probably about half the company's products that we're contracted to sell have specific verbiage in our dealership contracts that prevent us from selling on third-party marketplaces. Most dealers are explicitly denied the ability to go to places like Amazon and eBay and that kind of stuff and sell online.
We certainly can on our own website. We have a very good website. A lot of great information there, a lot of really good parts resources, but we are explicably prohibited by a lot of different companies from selling on Amazon and eBay and those kinds of places. That leads to something called retail arbitrage. You'll hear about this periodically from businesses that are trying to avoid the Amazon effect from having to have their products sold there. What ends up happening is that people will purchase items from those businesses, and then go and list them online themselves as an individual, adding a significant middleman in the middle. When that happens, you can start to see some really wonky pricing.
One thing I found here earlier while poking around was a Stihl Chainsaw Carrying Case. Stihl is one of those companies that is extremely aggressive about keeping their products from being sold on online marketplaces. The Stihl Chainsaw Woodsman Carrying Case sold under Stihl's own part number is on Amazon for $114.95 with free shipping, mind you, if you've got Prime. If you look through here, there's actually 38 reviews of that saw case, so clearly people are buying these things. That saw case though, if you came to our dealership, is $40. What's happening in this case is this isn't dealers or Stihl themselves that are selling things on Amazon's marketplace, it's people who are walking into Stihl dealerships and taking advantage of the fact that the dealers aren't allowed to sell there. They buy up these saw cases in some kind of bulk, list the item on Amazon, and in this case, make a really healthy profit at the expense of the people who are just blindly buying there.
Something you want to keep in mind, there are certain products that are going to make sense, more of those toys and that kind of stuff, but when you get into some of these funny contracted items, you got to really be careful and take the time and shop around. I'll tell you right now for the stuff that we sell there, Amazon is actually a fairly expensive marketplace to be on. They'll add about 14% worth of fees to every order that we sell. For the parts and items that we do list there, you will buy all of those things significantly less expensive, in our stores or from our own website, than you will from these other marketplaces that add those fees on top. Our cost of doing business is always the least expensive on our own services, so we pass those savings along to you. If you have any parts needs, you can call our Parts department. We've got a hotline number at 877-260-3528 or you can give us a call at 800-222-3373 for any equipment or service need that you might have.
