General Discussion

I was thinking of building affordable gaming pcs and affordable business/home pcs and selling them locally.

I would make a flyer and post it everywhere (stores, street signs, kijiji, craigslist). I would offer a gaming pc for $500-700 cash and a home/office PC with XP for about $450

Here's what im thinking

-Athlon 64 X2 5200+, 2GB DDR2 RAM, Cheap Micro ATX Mobo, Cheap case w/ 550w PSU, 250GB Harddrive, 9600GT, and Vista home basic 64-bit. My total cost is about $550 w/ taxes (thats being generous) because of the barebones discount i can get. I would charge $700 flat or $750 w/ setup. I would also include free troubleshooting via Email and phone for 3 months after and i would test all hardware to make sure none of it is faulty first.

-Athlon 64 x2 3800+, 2GB DDR2RAM, Cheap Micro ATX motherboard, Cheap generic case w/ cheap PSU, 250GB harddrive, integrated graphics and Vista Home basic or XP Home SP3 32-bit. My cost for this would be $350 max with tax and OS. I would charge $450, or $500 with installation for this. Plus 3 months of phone/email troubleshooting.

What does MMORPG think, do i have a chance out there if i appeal to the right market?

No not really. There is no real chance for a small PC business entering the market fresh in todays view of big ticket names such as DELL GATEWAY etc.

The reason is those manufacturers offer longer warranties and better support, cheap prices and decent hardware. Someone buying a PC will not likely look to you and buy $700 PC when they can go to DELL and get a little better PC with a warranty.

In my area alone there use to be 7 PC small businesses doing what you want to do and all of them went out of business about 5 years ago because of DELL and GATEWAY etc.

You also need a business license, and then you will have to pay taxes and all sorts headaches. You wont sell enough to give you a profit worth the time you put into building them. There are hundreds of online cheap PC builders, check ebay.

Better off doing a local PC repair service. People are always infecting their machines with viruses and spyware. And losing their data to hardware failng.

Its possible on a larger scale.  You have to actually actively be selling.  You can't just set up a PC store and expect people to come in.  Instead you setup meetings with major companies in your area to set a relationship.  I think these businesses would rather go through a local small shop then someone like DELL.  Since for tech support someone could be sent to repair over trying to learn how to from a guy in India.  Chances are the workload of 1 of these businesses does not require full time staff, but multiple of them could.

Also DELL is much more expensive selling PCs 2 times the worth of parts.

You'd probably be better off advertising yourself a little bit and telling people that you'll build them a PC if they buy the parts and pay you a small fee to put it together...you could provide guidance as to what kinds of parts to buy as well...I've thought of doing this myself, as I recently discovered how freaking easy it is to put a computer together.

Originally posted by Briansho

Better off doing a local PC repair service. People are always infecting their machines with viruses and spyware. And losing their data to hardware failng.

I agree. On the note of losing data to hardware failure, if you mean by hard drive failure the average cost to get 1gig of data recovered is around $10,000, and the price goes up to well over $100,000 for larger data recovery. Only experts in data recovery do this and the time takes months to get the data.

But yeah repair shops are where the money is.

Originally posted by Cleffy

Its possible on a larger scale.  You have to actually actively be selling.  You can't just set up a PC store and expect people to come in.  Instead you setup meetings with major companies in your area to set a relationship.  I think these businesses would rather go through a local small shop then someone like DELL.  Since for tech support someone could be sent to repair over trying to learn how to from a guy in India.  Chances are the workload of 1 of these businesses does not require full time staff, but multiple of them could.

Also DELL is much more expensive selling PCs 2 times the worth of parts.

All major businesses have on site or on call techs for everything. They have them on site or on call locally to get fixes asap because they depend on productivity. They are hired in the company. If they bought DELLS then the internal guy will deal directly with DELL to get repairs or help with a fix if they can't.

Buying for a business and needing large amounts of PC's you can't go wrong with DELL or similar because of the bulk savings.

Originally posted by Tyres100

Originally posted by Cleffy

Its possible on a larger scale.  You have to actually actively be selling.  You can't just set up a PC store and expect people to come in.  Instead you setup meetings with major companies in your area to set a relationship.  I think these businesses would rather go through a local small shop then someone like DELL.  Since for tech support someone could be sent to repair over trying to learn how to from a guy in India.  Chances are the workload of 1 of these businesses does not require full time staff, but multiple of them could.

Also DELL is much more expensive selling PCs 2 times the worth of parts.

 

All major businesses have on site or on call techs for everything. They have them on site or on call locally to get fixes asap because they depend on productivity. They are hired in the company. If they bought DELLS then the internal guy will deal directly with DELL to get repairs or help with a fix if they can't.

Buying for a business and needing large amounts of PC's you can't go wrong with DELL or similar because of the bulk savings.

yup, I manage a decent size network for a government contractor and our corporation purchases only from Dell.  If any piece of hardware goes out, its replaced within 4 hours no questions asked.  Depending on the security level of where the failed hardware came from, they give us up to a week to send the failed item back to them.

as far as the OP's question, if you have the capital to start it try Craigs list.  You wont sell a lot, but you may sell enough to keep you occupied.  Id be careful with the support though, that may bite you in the ass.  Id recommend selling the PC's as is.

I wanted to do this and did a lot of research.  You pretty much can't compete with whats available via the internet unless you can buy all your components at wholesale prices.

So unless you are selling to people who are too dumb to shop online...  It's no good.