Opinion: Marginal whiteboxes

You’d think people would always be looking for a no-name bargain, but today out of curiosity, I decided to see what Dell was charging for a basic business box.

Yeah, okay, I’ll admit it – the customer got my quote for a whitebox and said, “Are you kidding? Dell is much cheaper than you!”

You get used to that – customers will pull all sorts of tricks to get you to drop your pants…er…price.

Anyway, just to check if they were yanking my crank I wandered over to the Dell website.

Bugger. Those clowns are making it harder for a reseller to make a quid, that’s for sure. And one-year onsite warranty included.

Yikes! Sure, we give warranties, I’m sure you do too, but onsite for no extra is a bit of a stretch. Hmm.

If you can’t beat them…should we join them? Dell now claims to have resellers as well as their long-standing online store. But what’s it like being a Dell reseller?

You’ll have to educate me here, using that comments box below. C’mon there must be a few resellers displaying the Dell logo above the counter by now – how about you let the rest of us know whether it’s any good?

Right now I’m faced with the prospect of the customer ordering direct from Dell, then I’ll make a few bucks setting them up on the network and loading his chosen flavour of Vista, and his custom applications.

But there’ll be sod-all in the margins unless he needs a new printer. That’s assuming he hasn’t discovered the Dell page full of printers yet.

Bah. What’s the most margin you can extract from a patch lead these days?