What in the world does a hot tub cover have to do with disintermediation?

Disintermediation cuts out the middleman in a transaction.

Today’s installment of the real world web consumer (a.k.a.: Lifestyles of the Hopelessly Middle Class and Relatively Obscure) offers a case in point …

After much procrastination, we finally replaced Ranchero Indebto’s ratty old hot tub cover this week. But we didn’t buy the new cover locally. My jaw dropped when our local spa supply store quoted their price for a new hot tub cover. They wanted well over four hundred bucks.

After doing some preliminary research, I had expected that the local store might be as much as a hundred bucks less than that. Boy was I way off.

I thanked the sales person, picked my jaw up off the floor, strolled out, hopped in the car, drove home, and hopped back on the Internet.

I knew that shipping costs would be a big part of the final price. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a manufacturer nearby. After checking out a bunch of hot tub cover manufacturers in the search engines, I turned to eBay.

To my delight, I turned up a bounty of hot tub cover auctions. After a bit of legwork, I located a seller down south with a 100% approval rating and clicked the magic button. I faxed over the measurements and zapped them the cash.

It only took two weeks for our new custom-made hot tub cover to arrive via tractor trailer. The total cost including shipping was under three hundred bucks. We saved more than a c-note by ordering the cover directly from the manufacturer.

By ordering direct, the local spa store was disintermediated … cut right out of the transaction.

The open marketplace of the web has rocked traditional (tightly controlled) sales channels. Why buy a spa cover through a third-party when you can deal directly with the manufacturer?

I’ll still leave plenty of cash on other stuff at the local spa store, of course … say, for repairs (it just so happens that the pumps have gone on the fritz …)