How hard will it be to penetrate the PC market?
 

I have a friend who proposed a business idea to me today, he is looking for a large investment to start a PC company...Before I start doing research into this, just wondering if anyone actually has any insight into it here? How satiurated is the PC market? obviously the big hitters like DELL and Gateway own the market, but wondering if there is any room for a small guy?

A small computer biz in our city does the best.. its about 10 mins away from futureshop and thats one of the biggest computer electronic places in the city.. it does well because of the service and how personal it is for the customers. Prices blow away the big company stores and people go back all the time, been going there for 5 1/2 years now and wont go anywhere else!

Jenn, this will be purely a direct internet based venture when it starts, so there will not be a whole lot of customer interaction at the begining.

I found a small internet based "PC" company a month ago, based in the UK, I gave them a try I was prety impressed with the level of service. In my opinion if your friend is going internet based take a page out of their book and have a "contact" phone number, it was that "one to one" contact that sold me and the parts I was after where in the post the next working day.

http://www.amardacomputers.co.uk

People still like to get on a phone and talk to a voice more so if they are about to part with a lump sum of money to buy a PC.

MOO

:thumbsup

P.S. MetaformX you still aint colected your prize from me
ICQ: 117151486.

Thanx Raceman...The url doesnt work by the way. I will contact you about the prize in a few days, ive only collected like 10% of it so far. hehe. Thanx bro

Sorry Bro http://www.armadacomputers.co.uk <---- nice PC build idea on-line with these dudes

Only reminding you about the prize because I have sold the entire "Cleaner" program, you the only outstanding issue.


:thumbsup

oh, thats cool bro, I will contact you tomorow about it then! Thanx

:)

Easier than porn I can say that much!

hope he plans on dropping some doe for ads on tomshardware, anandtech, arstechnica, hardocp etc

20 yrs ago, our company was the only store in town(we operate from 2 buildings, open to general public). Now there are dozens, along with dell/gateway/ibm etc.

It's harder, but people stick with us because we are 'local', we 'know our shit', we 'care about our customers' etc. We also do well with larger orders, eg from schools and business because we can handle all things like network installation, cabling etc along with high end color copying/scanning and paper > digital indexing systems/webservers etc.

We also distribute photocopiers worth up around 30k. :-)
(specialization in certain things can give an edge against the almighty advertising budget/pricing power of dell and the other giants.)

It's hard, but doable. You need to be efficient, innovative and persistant among other things.

The biggest thing you need is to figure out what you niche is. Absent a "hook" of some type, you can only compete on price and with the volume discounts the big boys get, it is hard to make a living in the PC business when all you have to compete on is price.

Examples of successful niches would be alien, targeting very high ending gaming machines. But to get reasonable margins, you have to focus on something and have a message that you sell something that is different from the big guys.

I think one niche that might be available is the mini-PC. Shuttle has an entire line of small footprint attractive PCs that Dell and others don't match. Other companies have recognized the potential and have competing products out yet the Dell's of the world continue to focus on the full footprint models. Since these units are sold as barebones, there might be a business opportunity to take small attractive units, build them out, pair them with nice flat screen monitors and sell them to the yuppi crowd as the PC that you aren't ashamed to have sitting on the desk when company comes over.

That's just one idea off the top of my head. But you have to have some competitive advantage and lacking anything else all you can compete on is price. And that's a hard way to make a buck in the PC world these days.

with companies like cyberpowerpc.com and such with really low prices and the willingness to dropship. i think it could be hard to break into the market.

man, if i was to think of some pc related biz, it would be aftermarket and fixing.

idiots who buy dell and have finish their guarentee