How do wwe get the good stuff

[nattivillin]

Ive been reading reports on what consumers plan to buy in the next 12-14 months. Although they may be wrong and inaccurate, what if they are not?

We run a retail - service operation. We have multiple retail store locations in our city.

I have had a few people asking do we sell tablets, do we sell netbooks. I would probably not buy either personally, but eventually, you realize that your customers would buy it from you if you had it.

How come Bestbuy can sell a netbook for $299 and i cant even buy it for 299?

Does anyone try to compete on the retail end, or do you just stick with service?

[lpopejoy]

We only do service - for that very reason.

We do sales of parts/software, but we don't sell systems unless it is to a business.

On a side note, do you use CommitCRM @ all of your locations?

[paulNZ]

I have to agree with lpopejoy ... we only do service with the sale of parts.

We do sell systems, servers and printers, etc to business customers (seldom consumer customers) and at margins that are acceptable to us.

Business customers do not purchase on price (so much), they purchase on people, trust and service.

On that note more and more of our customers are being moved from break/fix to managed services. When customers have been on managed services for a period (6 months or more) they simply accept your recommendation and pricing.

In fact we have a couple (yes only two) of customers whom we meet with at the beginning of each financial year, help them set their IT budget and then manage that budget for them.

[pyro77]

We have a small retail display in our office and I probably keep it stocked mostly for my own entertainment. As we have grown, our markup from suppliers is adjusted and so now we can actually buy things like netbooks for $10 -$15 less than the future shops and best buys. Nattivillin, if you do want to compete, check with the manufacturer for month or year end rebates for quantity purchases. Sometimes they have kickbacks or reward cards as well. Alot of times, these box stores will sell those items at cost just to get people in the door and then they will upsell them on extended warranty or $2 network cables for $29.95.

Hope that helps..

[nattivillin]

@ lpopejoy. We dont really use CommitCRM at each location. We use the web version it to manage our on-site / mobile services only.

I would love to, but CommitCRM just isn't set up for multiple locations. The web version is handicapped at best. We have too much volume in our retail stores to use the web version exclusively. All the options aren't on the same screen, too many page jumps to do simple tasks.

Id'd pay $1000 for them to develop a sql database that talked to another database on a different server. Then each local install of CommitCRM could sync with itself in the background. Then each of my stores could run the client and the db would sync!

I can dream cant I!

We considered a TS box just to host CommitCRM and have everyone use that. The internet just isnt stable enough where we are. Our server frs / dfs has errors from time to time due to the vpn being down.

Back to the topic, i can actually get some stuff for $15 less than what BB sells for, but i cant sell with only $15 margins. It cost 2% just to process the CC. I assume bb is only making $15 per customer as well, but they have 1000 customers a day. So $15K a day (nice!)

We are 85% service as well, then we sell value and not just price.

[bwhatley87]

So what are you using to manage your stores?

[nattivillin]

the most inefficient but manageable solution. We still have QB for invoicing. Just cant beat its simplistic interface + the abilities it has. Each store runs its own QB.

We use CommitCRM for our non store stuff (commercial on-site, home visits, consulting, etc)

It allows us to keep up with whats going on globally with the non-retail side of things.

Only prob is the back end office stuff. We had to hire additional staff just to "compile" all the various databases, customer tracking, etc. the QB stuff is quite easy. Before we had CommitCRM we had our commercial stuff in QB. That just didnt work to easily find out whats going on with a commercial client from either retail location. The retail customers usually call the store they went to so that works out well.

Its a mess. We need one solution for all this mumbo jumbo. Prob is, it has to also be easy to use and stable. SO now we have a the retail side, the help desk side, and the dispatching side, all different systems, all working well, just the additional admin cost to keep up with everything.

We are still looking for one thing that does everything, but we may be approaching a custom solution. We've demo'd just about everything available and they all fall short either on abilities, speed, or stability.