Gateway Eliminates Online Sales Over the Weekend
Gateway has announced that it will stop selling computers on its website and instead will rely completely on third-party outlets to sell Gateway products.
When Gateway was acquired late last year it became a privately held company and a wholly owned subsidiary of Acer. The move to shift Gateway’s distribution model to focus exclusively on retailers, e-tailers and channel partners is an attempt to clean up the company’s business model save money.
Mark Hill, General Manager of Acer Group U.S. said the company was interested in offering customers the easiest way to purchase Gateway machines and that Acer believes “retail and e-tail partners offer consumers the best, easiest and most effective way to purchase Gateway products.”
A spokesperson for the company spoke to PC World and said that staff cutbacks were being made following the changes. “These reductions have been happening in small waves as the company has methodically evaluated each department and function.”
Gateway certainly wasted no time getting its online shop offline. The company made the announcement at 9am Friday and reports say sales conducted through the website concluded on Saturday evening.
Retailers flogging the machines include Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, Costco, HSN, Newegg, Tiger Direct, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Wal-Mart.
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...which will basically kill of the convertable tablet PC line as most retailers refuse to carry them. My last purchase was split between the Gateway tablet and an HP tablet - and the better resolution and lighter weight won out. As is, I went through Newegg - another online retailer.
Honestly, how expensive can it be to maintain an online order presence?
"Gateway Eliminates Sales Online Sales Over the Weekend"
Why does it always seem like articles on TH are never proofread?
How expensive can it really be to allow users to order directly off of the Gateway website? This is very strange news.
Why does it always seem like articles on TH are never proofread?
Because they aren't. This isn't a news site, it's more like a blog. Even the non-blog articles are blogs. Most of the "info" here is taken from other sites. As was mentioned by one of the article writers - they get paid per post. They get no points for quality.
I rated you one up because that is a good question. I think that Gateway is doing away with expensive service. By selling at Walmart they can limit their repair services more easily.
Here's two little stories about how this might pay out for Gateway:
1) You're an ignorant Wal-Mart loving consumer, and you want a computer. You go to Wal-Mart and buy a POS for $350. You take it home. After a year and two months your hard drive quits. You don't have your receipt or your warranty card and you have no idea how to look it up online. It wasn't worth upgrading when you bought it and it certainly isn't worth repairing now. You're screwed. You're ignorant, so naturally you follow someone's advice and take it to Geek Squad instead of a local shop where they actually know something about computers. Or, you let it sit in your humid basement where it collects dust and becomes a home for a common house spider and a small family of mice. You love Wal-Mart so much that a year later you decide to buy a laptop from there for $300. Little did you know that the laptop was poorly cooled, and one year and two months later, the NVidia GPU starts to give you a BSOD after 10 minutes of use.
2) You're an ignorant consumer who doesn't trust the internet for shopping, and you want a computer. You go to Best Buy and buy one. You take it home. After a year it breaks. You take it to the newbie repair techs at Geek Squad. They sell you a new video card and motherboard because your via onboard chip overheated. Price of motherboard? $75. Video card? Another $65. You get a budget micro atx board and a two year old low-end video card. They just suckered you and Gateway earned good money from the original sale.
@JonnyDoh
Sounds about right I guess. They've turned from a consumer company into a wholesale one. If they weren't making their money back on the consumer markup to cover the warranty / tech support costs, then this makes sense.