Would you pay????

Would you pay for, or think it would be a good deal to have someone build your computer for you for only parts plus $25.00 labor. Keep in mind, for all of this you get the option for a 3 year warranty, parts and labor. The warranty is available for 10% of the build price. $800 build would cost $80 for 3 year warranty. What do you think? Good deal or no?

I want to start a site like this if I can get some people interested.

If you're building low-end systems, it's a difficult way to make money. Dell/HP/etc have the low-end cornered because of their bulk pricing. You just can't compete with the big guns. On the high-end, however, you stand a good chance of making some dough. You can charge a lot more for the labor/knowledge that goes into a high-end rig. Also, people are willing to pay more because the system is so powerful. They probably will have difficulty seeing the labor and parts as two separate fees. If it's low end, they expect to pay very little (hence, difficult to make a large profit). If it's high end, they expect to pay a lot (hence, opportunity to make a larger profit). Additionally, if you can find ways to cut costs without sacrificing performance (price/performance ratio), some of that savings can be passed on to you.

Careful with that warranty thing. Are you going to be the first level tech support for all of your customers? Believe me, they will have questions and problems and it's many times not related to the build itself, but something they did or are trying to do. Also, with parts, are you going to eat the cost if the part actually only has a 1 year manufacturer warranty but it dies after 2 years?

It's a good idea, but again, low-end isn't profitable and the tech support can be killer. One thing to remember, however, is to ALWAYS test parts thoroughly before handing the build over. Burn-in, Memtest, disc scan (recommend Spinrite to find and disable bad sectors before installing the OS), CPU/RAM stress test, monitor temps, etc. Keep the results of these tests in a file for each customer.

Edit: I agree, $25/build is short-changing yourself. The problem is with low-end builds because by the time you buy all the parts, you've already matched HP/Dell and you haven't yet taken a slice for your labor. With high-end builds, depending on how complicated it is, tack on like $150-200. Mid-to-High, maybe like $100. Mid: $75, Low: $50

Yes, if your prices for parts are competitive. Visit a few shops in your area (online or in person) and see what their policies and prices are. Just pretend you are a semi-clueless person and want them to build you a PC
BTW, that will also give you an idea how to treat potential customers. See who treats you best and try to behave like them.

Last time I got a computer I bought everything from the local shop and added C$35 to have them assemble and test it for 48 hours. They even installed XP and got the latest drivers from nVidia, Gigabyte, Creative, etc. $3000 PC, $35 markup to save me a day's work and minimize the risk of RMAs. Well worth it IMO. I can build a PC myself, but my time is worth more than $35 a day.

I wouldn't have paid $350. Think about capping that 10% at $100 or something, or you will only build very cheap PCs.

Be very careful about the warranties. What do you mean "parts and labor"? You can't offer warranties on parts, IMO. What if you get a bad batch of 9800GX2s or whatever other expensive thing and then end up paying for replacements yourself? I don't really know how this works, but that's OK, you're the one who needs to know this. I think the warranties on parts should be provided by the manufacturers, not you. Word your contracts carefully or you can get in big trouble.

I want to make systems of 4 different levels.
1. Low end compete with Dell in price but offer better quality.
2. Midrange.
3. Average gamer.
4. extreme gamer.

Profits:
1. $25
2. $50
3. $100
4. $200

Warranty is outsource at no extra cost to me. I actually get a % for selling warranty.

I got one on eBay for a trial run. Just a low end build. I know to everyone on here it look like junk but to someone on eBay looking for a deal will se it a a steal. Later today I plan to put other systems of various quality on as well.

I plan to offer 4 tiers of Intel and 4 tiers of AMD when I get it all done.

Building computers is my pasion. The main reason I want to do this is because I am a single father of a special needs child, and it would be better for me to stay home with him to make my living. I dont need to get rich by any means but if I could make $100 profit a week we can make it. For $100 I would have 2 sell 4 cheap systems or one good one every week. You think its possible?

Here is the one I got up now. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.d [...] RK:MESE:IT Keep in mind this is to compete with the big oems. Nothing to right home to mom about, but a very reasonable computer for everyday tasks. And $39.00 for a 3 year warrany cant be beat. Most el cheapo oems only offer a 1 year warranty these days and charge way about four times as much for the 2 more years.

Could you explain the whole warranty out-source thing?

I think you'd be better off sticking to a set of standard parts. If you let them wheel and deal off of newegg, they may be picking incompatible part, parts with known issues or low quality, or parts that plain don't work.

Replace the Newegg watermarked picture from your eBay auction. Take a picture of the actual case at your house.

I own a small business and I know how it is trying to find the right price and make enough profit without trying to look greedy.

Figure out how much time it takes you to build each one and decide how much you want to make in profit per hour of work. If you can find a part supplier that will give you price breaks for buying 20 mb's at a time, then you can figure your price based on the regular price for an unseen mark up. I bargain shop. I would notice that I could buy that MB for X amount myself. So if you can get it for less than joe public that is money already made.

The best thing you can do is research suppliers. You will need to start off with maybe 2 build options, then when you have enough profit money buy more parts and offer more.

I just had a new OSC site built and had a lot of code work done by a guy in AU. He does really good work and the exchange rate helped with cost. If you sell right off your own site it will cut some overhead but will take some up front investment.

Hope this helps.

Thanks. I will use original pictures after someone buys one and I make it LoL. I stated on auction allow 3-4 days after reciving cleared payment for it to be shipped. This allows me to buy it on there money and build/test before I send it. I got $30 in my bank account.

As money rolls in there will be alot of changes that look alot more professional. Once I save enough I'm gonna pay for a custom eBay site that has drop down menus for add ons.

It takes me about 30 minutes to put one together and start copying the OS to the HDD. And running tests takes hitting a button and checking on it every once in a while.

For $25 dollars you get zip tie cableing. Highend machines will be hid in good cases and shrunk wrapped.

I keep a copy of Windows Vista with SP1 on a seperate HDD and leave it in admin mode so once I copy it to the target machine I can run system prep and then when the end user turns it on it will register itself to the motherboard. This makes the install go alot faster. I'll keep one image for each motherboard that I use. I'll probably use a total of 6-8 different motherboards.

I figured you did something like that. So all you really have to do is put it together ?

Nice!!! Sounds like a plan.

Yes that looks reasonable. People will think.. "Wow dual core for under $500 shipped.. Plus I don't have to deal with the Geek Squad to get it. (no offense if anybody is on the squad just talking about the few bad apples )

Or you might try putting the total all together $448 with FREE SHIPPING! People like the word "FREE"

Did you read some of the threads talking about the stuff best buy employees tell you when you buy a pc ?

If you are a college student or doing this as a hobby, it might be fun. If you intend on supporting yourself, I know many who have tried. I used to buy from a system builder who rose to be the 7th largest shipper on whole systems in the US behind the Dell's Gateways, HP etc. For reasons of anonymity, I'd prefer not to name.

The head of R & D and the Head of TS went out and formed their own company. They lasted just under two years....they couldn't support their families....on margins of $200 per box.

Look at it this way:

-Time spent with customer asking your advice as to parts: 15 - 30 min
-Ordering, unpacking parts, paying bills, throwing out boxes etc.: 15 - 30 min
-Assembling parts: 45 - 90 min
-Installing Windows, drivers, updates, tweaking, burn in: 60-90 min
-Packing up and shipping: 15 - 30 min

So 2.5 - 4.5 hours is about $5-$10 an hour on your low range and that doesn't even begin to cover the tech support calls.

-I went to buy something on line but my credit card won't come out of the floppy drive when I hit the eject button.
-I can't see if the power plug is in cause we have a power outage and there's no lights on
-No fax just won't work, I hold a sheet of paper up against the monitor but when I hit ENTER nothing happens.

Yes, these are real calls my two old friends had to handle. Every time windows don't boot, you are obligated to take the call under the distributor service pack agreement. This is what kills everyone. That and returns, shipping etc for example when something pops loose on shipping.

The other thing on the low end, shipping adds 15% to the cost which makes peeps wanna just go to Office Max. BTW, many states are gonna frown on 3 days....I believe most states require 30.

I don't have a mortgage but medical insurance alone is $1,100 a month....other insurances, (home, auto etc) are over $400 a month. Utilities are over $500 a month. I am afraid to calculate the food bill with 3 teenagers

Most people with families need at least $3-4k a month to survive which generally means clearing about $20 / hour on a 40 hour work week. I think anyone would be hard pressed to do that building PC's. Then again, you say you can survive on $400 a month, so that should be enough for you and after building 1 -4 boxes if you lose time on extra TS stuff, it's not gonna be an issue.

You could also offer OS/drivers installation as a separate service. They bring you the O/S DVD, you download the best drivers for their O/S and their hardware and do the installations. People would be interested, I believe. Of course, it's not an easy job, what with all the versions of XP and Vista and all the hardware choices out there.

Edit: how about RAID configuration. My local guys charge $5 for that separately.

Thganks for the info. I've been researching different distributer avenues and most of them you have to have an excellent credit rating. Doh. Others are crap like dropshipping. I checked into several dropshipping places and you ahve to pay $50 up front or more to see what you can sell. They show samples are there home page and once you pay the real prices are no where near there samples. Pretty much Newegg prices that I can get without a monthly fee. But ya I really hope we can make it work.

How much do you charge to make it work? I personally dont see any need to go over a $3000 budget with todays hardware. I know it could be done but it would be money down the toilet IMO. After $2500 the price performance ratio sucks.

Ya I hear ya. I would rather have a good reliable fast computer that I could count on then one that had a 30,000 3dmark06 score that overheated and didnt work with all games and all the other hastles of it.

I'm lefthanded and I hate playing games on the computer. It just feels weird to me. I sold my WoW account for $100 and now I game solely on xbox 360. It feels alot better to me. I wish Crysis was on 360 but COD4 is cool.

I use my PC as a media center.
Asus P5K SE
E2180 oc 3.0 stock cooler.
2g Adata value Ram.
660G HDD space.
8500GT.
Vista Ultimate.
42" Vizio 1080P LCD. More then I really need atm. I want to get a 9450 when I can. Or maybe the q6700 when they slash them to $250ish APril 20th. I do some home videos and I have to transfer DvDs to .wmv to get them to stream to xbox so a quad would be nice.

I got my xbox 360 on the network so I can stream music and video to it. 360 is picky about video format. Vista Media center plays ripped DvDs no problem with a small registry tweak.



old monitor with DvD Library running.

Oh last thing, if you ever get a shop, may consider a system or 2 with a couple games on it for people to play on so they can get an idea of your work.

Update. I sold my first one. Woot.

Thanks.