Expanding Retail

[Maniaman]

I realize there's been a ton of threads on retail and what to stock. I've gone through and read many of the recent ones. However, many of them are from 6 months to a year or two ago. I know I've read about PCX expanding his retail services, and there was a great post by stro in a thread about what all he was carrying.

I'm getting ready to expand my retail offerings. I'm getting tired of referring people elsewhere when they are looking for parts or components that I don't have. Currently I've been stocking cables, wireless usb adapters, wireless routers, wireless mice, wired keyboards/mice, some usb sticks (8gb&16gb), and different adapters, couplers, etc. And of course, I have a huge supply of used parts in the back that I will sell if someone wants something and doesn't care if its used (RAM, pci modems, network cards, etc).

My only competition from a retail standpoint is the local Walmart. The nearest Best Buy/Staples/etc is a 45 minute drive away. I know I won't be able to compete on price with Walmart for everything.

I'd like to know what kind of items are working well for everyone else now, and what items aren't. I'd really love to hear from those of you with larger stores like PCX, SprinterTech, stro, and ComputerPro.

I'm tossing around adding the following items:
-LED/LCD Monitors (1 or 2 choices on size)
-Printers
-Printer ink (except there's so many to chose from, I would only stock ink for printers I sell, and special order other types)
-Laptop cases & cooling pads
-External Hard Drives
-Couple models of laptops, couple models of desktops, not super expensive, and not super cheap either. Probably $500-$800 range.
-Assorted sticks of RAM. Probably 1GB DDR, 2GB sticks of DDR2, 4GB sticks of DDR3.
-Hard Drives. Probably 500GB & 1TB SATA drives, both desktop and laptop size. Possibly an SSD or two. These would be drives we would also use in repairs. Would it be worth it to get them with retail packaging? If not what's the best way to keep them displayed on a retail shelf?

I'm really torn on the following:
-Tablets. iPads, Microsoft Surface, random Android tablet of the week. Droid tablets are all I can get from D&H. I'd prefer to stick to iPad and Surface, but don't know where to get them and if there would be enough markup to make them worth it.
-iDevice accessories, like cases, stands, docks, earbuds, etc.
-Desktop components like processors, motherboards, etc. that are rarely used in repairs.
-Video cards. GPU tech advances so fast and the prices change so fast I feel like these are better to customer order

Once I start adding more items, what's a good way to get word out about them? I thought about taking a few full or half page ads in the local classifieds paper that gets mailed to everyone in the community, and laying out a bunch of different items we sold, along with prices.

I really want to redefine our business to be more of a go-to place for all of your electronics needs, not just a place you go to for repairs.

 

[PCX]

A few thoughts and then I well tell you what has been working for me.

First and foremost, I believe it was Stro who gave me one of the best pieces of advice. Basically he said that you want to have a wide selection, not a deep one. In other words, don't worry about stocking a whole lot of one item, instead, start out by stocking smaller quantities of lots of items. This will make your store look full and complete with several types of items. Basically, it gives the customer the impression that if any store has a certain item, it is your store. The opposite is true if you take the opposite approach.

The other thing to note is that many items will likely be fillers. They will make your shelves look full and pretty. There are a couple reasons for this:

1: You need your store to look full and pretty, it gives the impression of being a real store and being successful, especially when your competition has nothing. I started out by filling our shelves with items I could get cheap and could still make a decent profit.

2: Some items simply do not sell well or sell quickly. This may be true for some items in some areas and not for other items in other areas. You may not know until you take a leap of faith and find out.

Currently, my main distributor is DandH. I started out with small orders at first. $200 or $300 every week or so. It then became $400 to $500 and within about 6 months, I was placing orders of at least $1000 and at times around $1800. Start small if you have too, but as quickly as you can, get those orders to $1000 so that you can ask for price discounts and so you can save on free shipping.

It is up to you to sell your items. I would first start with items you can easily up-sell:

AV
EXT HDD
Flash Drives
Cooling Pads
Chargers

You will have to advertise your retail store. How you do it will depend on your area. I personally did not start advertising my retail too much at first because I had a small selection. I did not want to advertise like I had a huge selection and get people in the door only to realize that we had nothing to offer them. Chances are, if they got that impression, they would not come back in the future. Until you feel that you can advertise, you will need to rely on your current customer base, up-selling and foot traffic from repairs.

Some items will sell themselves. One way we do this is by setting up speakers that we sell in our shop and play music through them. We sell a lot of these.

This is a list of most of the type of items we sell

Anti-Virus Software
Laptops
Desktops
Cell Phones
Cell Phone Cases
Cell Phone Guards
Otterbox Cell Phone Cases
Flash Drives
External Hard drives
Laptop Cases
Laptop / Netbook Sleeves
Wireless / USB Mice
Wireless / USB Keyboards
Wireless Routers and Switches
Cooling Pads / Chill Mats
Laptop Back Packs
Laptop Chargers and Batteries
AA / AAA batteries
LED / LCD Monitors
HDMI Cables
VGA / DVI Cables
USB Cables
USB SD Card Readers
USB Hubs
Power Cords for Desktops
Laptop Memory (RAM)
Surge Protectors / Supressors
SkullCandy Head Phones (coming soon, just got to make my first order)
Stereo Computer Speakers


Items that we sell a lot of:

AV
EXT HDD (you wont make a huge profit, but at least they are buying from you)
Flash Drives
Cooling Pads
Chargers (we sell Anker)
2.1 Stereo Speakers
Refurbished Laptops (tons and tons of these)
iPhone, iPod and iPad cases and screen protectors
USB Wifi Adapters
Wifi routers
cables
USB Hubs and Card readers
HDD enclosures


These are the items that sell, but not as well as the above:

Refurbished Desktops
Keyboards and Mice
laptop cases and sleeves
AA/AAA batteries
JVC Gumy earbuds
Surge Protectors

These are the items I have yet to sell

Laptop backpacks
LCD/LED Monitors (I really have no where to set them up and display them though)


I have also included a more recent picture of our retail since the last time I posted here

 

[stro]

I'm really torn on the following:
-Tablets. iPads, Microsoft Surface, random Android tablet of the week. Droid tablets are all I can get from D&H. I'd prefer to stick to iPad and Surface, but don't know where to get them and if there would be enough markup to make them worth it.
-iDevice accessories, like cases, stands, docks, earbuds, etc.
-Desktop components like processors, motherboards, etc. that are rarely used in repairs.
-Video cards. GPU tech advances so fast and the prices change so fast I feel like these are better to customer order

I used to carry mobos and cpus, but demand fell way off, so I do not do it anymore.

Also with Video cards, it is a waste of capital. I just stock basics for repairs. A cheap PCI-E and a PCI card. Not even stocking AGP anymore.

I too am frustrated with tablets. You really have three choices, Ipads, Quality Android, and cheap crap Android. The cheap androids have a nice price, but do not usually come with the Google Play Store, quite often are resistive instead of capacitive touch, and have low capacities. Even for the higher quality android, I have been annoyed at updates, both the speed and availability of new android updates.

The real money in tablets is in the app stores which we cannot take part in. Yes there is money in accessories, but unless you are selling the tablets, driving the sale of these accessories is tough. The only thing I currently carry are the USB cords and chargers.

And Service Work, for the most part they do not get viruses or need alot of the typical work we do on PC's. I am making a little doing email setups and configuring air-print printers, but that is about it.

The problem with tablets for us, is everyone knows what they cost. Everyone knows the new Ipad is $500 for the base model. Not even Walmart gets to discount it. If you ever notice when Walmart is trying to offer a deal, they do not reduce the price, they just offer a Gift Card along with it. It is very hard to sell something at a price much higher than the big box store down the road.

Android tablets are pretty much sold at big box stores for the same are your wholesale price. I read somewhere that even Asus/Google is only making about 8 dollars a piece on the Nexus 7 tablets. Apple, even if they were currently accepting new authorized resellers, they had such ridiculously high quotas, you would probably not be able to reach it.

Rumor has it that Apple has business accounts where if you spend enough in a year you can see a discount around 5%, but then you would still have to get a tax exemption from them and then the other problem is the warranty starts on your receipt date, not the date you resell.

So what I doing right now is making my Laptop sales and services more appealing and competitive so that people are choosing laptops over tablets.

But I am still looking for a way to make money selling tablets.

 

[PCX]

Stro, how is your luck with selling parts in general? I am leery of carrying retail parts like HDDs and memory because of so-called techs who may purchase a part only to say it does not work (simply because they have no clue what they are doing or because they simply purchased a part for troubleshooting) and turns around and demands a refund. I honestly do not want to have to deal with the returns from people like this. How often do you see this happen?

 

[stro]

It just doesn't happen. Most of the hard drives and memory I sell gets installed by me anyways. I do have people buying from me after being sent to me by other shops but I have never seen returns from them either.

With memory, I install it for free, so I know it works before it leaves the store. This also gives me the opportunity to get it in the shop and try to sell a tuneup. Almost every PC that needs memory, quite often needs a tuneup as well.

One of the big things I do is talk with the customer about the purchase to avoid selling them something they think they need that they do not. For instance it is common for people to come in wanting to buy a hard drive when their computer won't even turn on.

Or I'll ask how do they know it is bad. Quite often they just think it is bad. So then I will explain to them the only way to know is to run proper diagnostics, at which point I offer to run diagnostics for a fee.

I also charge a restocking fee. Keeps people from spraying their system with parts, hoping to get lucky and trying to leave me with a bunch of open packages.

I have acquired quite a few new customers for service work and parts because I stock parts that my competitors do not.

 

[PCX]

It just doesn't happen. Most of the hard drives and memory I sell gets installed by me anyways. I do have people buying from me after being sent to me by other shops but I have never seen returns from them either.

With memory, I install it for free, so I know it works before it leaves the store. This also gives me the opportunity to get it in the shop and try to sell a tuneup. Almost every PC that needs memory, quite often needs a tuneup as well.

One of the big things I do is talk with the customer about the purchase to avoid selling them something they think they need that they do not. For instance it is common for people to come in wanting to buy a hard drive when their computer won't even turn on.

Or I'll ask how do they know it is bad. Quite often they just think it is bad. So then I will explain to them the only way to know is to run proper diagnostics, at which point I offer to run diagnostics for a fee.

I also charge a restocking fee. Keeps people from spraying their system with parts, hoping to get lucky and trying to leave me with a bunch of open packages.

I have acquired quite a few new customers for service work and parts because I stock parts that my competitors do not.

Its good to hear that from someone who has been doing it for a while. I obviously install all the parts we sell, but I was concerned about retail parts we put on the shelves for do-it-yourselfers. What would you recommend carrying for parts? HDD, memory, size, form factor, technology, etc?


Oh, and I figured it was worth mentioning that with my demographics, there are a lot of young marines (radio and comm guys) who think they are also techs and nothing you tell them will convince them otherwise or that they are wrong about their diagnosis. These are the guys that I am concerned about. I guess that's where the restocking fee comes in, which brings me to my next question. What do you do with returned items if there is nothing wrong with them?

 

[stro]

If a package is busted open, I charge 20%. If they do not open it, then I do not charge.

I mainly stock 320's and 500's in 2.5 and 3.5 sata. I usually stock a 1-2TB 3.5 for external enclosures.

I stock 1 3.5 IDE drive for quick repairs of older business systems that seem to come in from time to time.

I quit stocking 2.5 IDE 6 months ago, because most of the time machines that would need them are not work the cost to fix.

Memory I do:

ddr3 and ddr3 SO: 2GB and 4GB
ddr2: 1GB & 2GB
ddr2 SO: 2GB
ddr1 and ddr1 SO: 512 and 1GB

Due to compatibility with PC133 512 and larger, I only special order that stuff. PC133 stopped selling with regularity about 6 months ago.

Things will be different with different demographics, but you can adjust along the way. And all these items are items you can use up in repairs if they do not sell well at retail.

Quite often I will buy the matched pairs and mark them with a numbers to identify the pairs if I need to sell them as a pair, but also sell them separately.

 

[PCX]

Thanks Stro.

------------------------

 

[tarik]

blank media, ink, dvd cd cases, plastic wallets, paper.
These are by far our biggest sellers. We carry almost a full range of stock (apart from cpus really) we have basic graphics cards, motherboards etc. I really like your store PCX, we have more stock but nowhere near as tidy

 

[Maniaman]

Thanks for your input. I've been spending some time tonight going through D&H and making a spreadsheet with ideas for items to carry. Obviously won't have room (or money) for everything on the list, but I'll slowly work on building it up over time. Probably only stock 1 or 2 of each item unless it's a hot seller.

I really need to get into selling AV. I've just been recommending MSE to everyone since we opened, and I really need to start trying to upsell people to Kaspersky.

 

[PCX]

Thanks for your input. I've been spending some time tonight going through D&H and making a spreadsheet with ideas for items to carry. Obviously won't have room (or money) for everything on the list, but I'll slowly work on building it up over time. Probably only stock 1 or 2 of each item unless it's a hot seller.

I really need to get into selling AV. I've just been recommending MSE to everyone since we opened, and I really need to start trying to upsell people to Kaspersky.

We sell Kaspersky to just about everyone that does a virus removal, reinstall or HDD replacements and as well as a great majority of our customers that come in for other issues. We make between $40 and $90 on each (depending on version and number of users) and charge $15 for installing the software. with 150+ repairs a month, it adds up real quick.

 

[Maniaman]

Where do you get your copies of Kaspersky from? On D&H I'd only be making like $10 if I sold it at the ERP, and that's before factoring in shipping costs. Likewise, are you just doing the antivirus edition, internet security edition, or both?

 

[PCX]

Amazon. I wait until the prices come down to around $15 or less and order in bulk. If I run out then the most I usually pay is around $20. We carry

Kaspersky Anti-virus 3 user 1 year
Kaspersky Internet Security 1 user 1 year
Kaspersky Internet Security 3 user 1 year
Kaspersky One 5 user 1 year (bought a buch of these for $12 recently)

 

[TekSolution]

If you don't want to carry stock why not sell things that you could get from your supplier? Inventory is a big waste of money if you're the one in the end holding something for months without selling it.

You have your retail store setup so have a section of what people want and order it for them and if it comes in a few days you can notify them.

 

[SprinterTech-WI]

If you don't want to carry stock why not sell things that you could get from your supplier? Inventory is a big waste of money if you're the one in the end holding something for months without selling it.

You have your retail store setup so have a section of what people want and order it for them and if it comes in a few days you can notify them.

most people want it now.... they don't want to wait 2 days for a mouse... they want to look at the selection and buy one, otherwise they'll go to walmart.

We don't stock much for laptops but if and when we do they sell 100x better than special order.

 

[PCX]

If you don't want to carry stock why not sell things that you could get from your supplier? Inventory is a big waste of money if you're the one in the end holding something for months without selling it.

You have your retail store setup so have a section of what people want and order it for them and if it comes in a few days you can notify them.

most people want it now.... they don't want to wait 2 days for a mouse... they want to look at the selection and buy one, otherwise they'll go to walmart.

We don't stock much for laptops but if and when we do they sell 100x better than special order.

Which is why I suggested having a wide selection of items, but not to have a huge amount tide up in inventory. Typically, if there is a particular item that I see requested often enough, I will start carrying a small inventory of that item. Like Christ said, people want it now, not two days from now. Otherwise, they will just go to Best Buy or some other store.

 

[SprinterTech-WI]

you know it.


We have 6 types of wireless mice right now... they sell extremely well, same with keyboards..... but selection is key, plus things like 1ea of 4 different colors fills the shelves without breaking the bank.