What's with the massive price difference between Dell VAR prices vs xByte prices??!?
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@scottalanmiller said in What's with the massive price difference between Dell VAR prices vs xByte prices??!?:
@dave247 said in What's with the massive price difference between Dell VAR prices vs xByte prices??!?:
@scottalanmiller said in What's with the massive price difference between Dell VAR prices vs xByte prices??!?:
@dave247 said in What's with the massive price difference between Dell VAR prices vs xByte prices??!?:
@jaredbusch said in What's with the massive price difference between Dell VAR prices vs xByte prices??!?:
@dave247 said in What's with the massive price difference between Dell VAR prices vs xByte prices??!?:
I think I will go through xbyte even if my VAR tells me they can match their prices...
They can't. That is not how it works.
Well actually one time my VAR matched the exact refurb prices that I was going to get from xbyte like last minute. I got like 5x Dell N series switches brand new for refurb price - which was like $2,500 each instead of the $7k or w/e they were when I was buying them.
They can take a loss if they want, most likely they were just having xByte deliver them directly and not marking them up.
But here is a simple rule... if you need your VAR to match a better price somewhere else, your VAR is making you do extra work and burn other relationships up front to lock you in. You waste time and effort (that's money) and other vendors won't keep quoting you good prices if you don't then buy from them. Tricking you into raising the price from other vendors is how price matching works out for your VAR.
I don't understand this part: "Tricking you into raising the price from other vendors is how price matching works out for your VAR."
The vendor is convincing you to go get good prices from other people. Those people are providing good prices in the hopes of earning your business by being better. Your vendor then convinces you that even though the new vendor treated you better, to stick with them. Your old vendor (the price matcher) now knows that you aren't loyal and will shop around, so they know it's time to "drive to the bottom" and lower prices by lowering service. The new vendor (the one giving you a good price) gets taught that doing a good job for you gets them nowhere and getting you a good quote is a waste of resources, so they will stop doing so and just start quoting rack rates, because you are just wasting their time.
"Shopping around" for prices is a dangerous game unless you are just looking up public web prices. But a VAR, by definition, is not about price but about services. If you care about price, then using a VAR is a mistake every time. You want a pure reseller who isn't marking up to add services to the product. Yes, in IT we need to ensure our prices are good. But you can't get good prices by going around to everyone and getting quotes, it will feel like you are getting good prices, but the products are not directly comparable and the best prices exist only for loyal customers with good relationships.
At this point though, I'm thinking my VAR is really just a re-seller. He doesn't add too much value and when he does give his input, I think it's usually based on a bit of antiquated IT knowledge.. We've bought workstations, servers, firewalls and MS licenses through him but he also does consulting and services sort of like a MSP. My boss has in the past hired him to do consulting and things so we've paid him for "services" and things.... So going back to all the stuff I've seen you post on SW, we were buying stuff from the guy who was also doing the consulting... you know the rest of the story. However, I more or less halted this when I came on. I started asking questions, doing my own work and shopping around for better deals on hardware. I still go to him now and again mainly for MS licensing and the last thing was new Dell switches which I got refurb price.
