Get those geeks!

Another sore point among resellers that cater for these communities is inventory management. The audience for these products is sizeable enough and active enough to warrant attention, yet their embrace of a digital lifestyle means they are also avid internet shoppers who will happily surf for hours on end to research a particular product they feel may make a difference to their machine.

The result is extraordinarily well-educated customers who know almost to the day when products should be on sale and have low tolerance for supply chain failures.

Vendors manage this demand using stealth tactics. “Ideally, you want products in stock the day publicity starts,” Thermaltake’s Lim says.

“But it takes about six weeks to get our products into Australia, so we aim to ensure that branch offices get the product six weeks before marketing activities commence. It is nice to have the products here before their existence becomes known on the web.”

Yet for resellers, this is a double-edge sword. Satisfying early demand can, as Mittoni says, mean low margins. But such is the pace of release that any excess inventory means almost certain red ink.

“We keep very low inventory,” Plus Corporation’s Fernandes says. “We assume products are about to be obsolete and are always busily unloading the old and getting orders for the new.”

Close relationships with vendors to secure knowledge of new releases and sample units is therefore critical, as early online marketing drives buyers to resellers they perceive as being the best source for new products.

“The enthusiasts do a lot of research,” Mittoni says. “They do searches worldwide and discuss the products online. They will not go to Harvey Norman and see what they have got. At the very least you need to keep your website up to date in advance of a product’s release. You need information on new releases.” That information can be gleaned through close vendor contact, a practice Mittoni maintains with occasional trips to trade shows in Taiwan -- most vendors in this space originate on the island -- to preview new products.

Plus' Fernandes: Low incomes drive modders to search for low prices

Information obtained on such trips is most valuable when posted to community sites like overclockers.com.au (known in the trade as OCAU). “OCAU is the largest of its type and we looked at it first for our marketing,” Fernandes says. “If you add all the other sites in Australia together you don’t get the same sized audience. And the power of the OCAU network and the forums it operate is extraordinary. Put a new product on the site and you can get 50–w100 views in an hour. Those readers tend to be looking at where to get that product from and luckily we are one of the first to have it.”

But even that early access may not win buyers. Shoppers for the specialised products favoured by modders, gamers and overclockers glean information from OCAU and a global collection of similar websites that review products in extraordinary detail, usually offering thousands of words that examine every aspect of its operations.

The site arstechnica.com, for example, reviewed Apple’s iPod nano within days of its release (see http://arstechnica.com/reviews/ hardware/nano.ars/ for details) and gleefully subjected the machine to tests designed to destroy it that included running it over with a car to test its resilience.

Once the car had successfully destroyed the music player (which survived a surprisingly long time), the review literally dissected the machine and, as is typical for reviews that cater for this community, featured many large images of the machine’s innards.

This forensic interest in components is yet another indicator of the different motivations that drive these buyers’ behaviour.

It is also an indicator that these customers are likely to be more work than many others. Few buyers of conventional PC equipment are likely to have any interest in the model number of Toshiba’s flash memory or the differences between touch wheels in convention iPods and the nano, yet both topics were deemed worthy of attention in Ars Technica’s review.

But perhaps that is also part of the fun and challenge of working in this most peculiar of PC markets.

“I think what attracted us to it is that this is a very exciting market because it offers exciting products that are out of the ordinary,” Mittoni says.

“The customers are quite niche as well. They are very specific in terms of what they want, which gives us an opportunity to deal with the cutting edge type of technology.”

“In terms of just selling computer gear, this is far more interesting than dealing with standard products.”