System News
Sales events are great, but Mark Williams knows a way of always finding the best deal on PC hardware.
SALE! It’s the word that shops just love to plaster on all their marketing in emails, pamphlets, signage and in online stores. It triggers potential customers into looking closer, enticing them to slowly reach for their wallets. And with good reason; there’s money to be saved and bargains to be had!
For the retailer, there’s an obvious fine line between how much of a discount you give versus how much of an uplift in sales it generates. A friend of mine recently bought himself all the parts for a new PC he wanted to build and jumped in during a big sales event. I was pleasantly surprised at what he was able to build for the money: i5-8400, B360 motherboard, 16GB RAM, RX580 8GB, 256GB SATA SSD, 2TB HDD, H500 case and a 750W PSU. At the time of writing that would amount to essentially a $1,500 build. Thanks to the sales that were on though, $50 was saved on the graphics card and a further $100 was saved on the CPU/RAM/ Motherboard combo. The $150 in total savings brought the actual cost to basically $1,350, a full 10% off the entire build. Impressive! Especially at the low $1,000s price point where edges start to be cut, and hard decisions made.
Going back to the seller’s point of view, that effective 10% cut in sales price of a system build represents a cut to margins and thus profits. To counter this, retailers need to shift a lot more units to compensate, and this is where the sales start to work their magic. Jaimie from Leader Computers informed us that “we see a massive uplift in business from our large online retailers during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period, approximately 15-20% for the ones who actively market during these sales”.
As you can see, the 10% loss in profit comes with a 15-20% increase in sales so they come out ahead thanks to the increased buzz from the sales event. It also presents the opportunity to get rid of ageing stock and to gain new customers. It’s a win-win for everyone!
You can of course win even more so by shopping around for the best deals. This is where one of my favourite websites comes into play, staticICE ( http://staticice.com. au). This Australian website is basically a search engine for computer parts prices and some other consumer tech like cameras, phones and headphones for example. Just type the name of the part/ item you’re interested in and immediately get results sorted by price.
This site has been around since 2004 and surprisingly still looks and functions the same. With almost 200 Australian retails being searchable this offers a very quick and powerful way to find out where not only the best prices can be had but you can use it to build a picture of which retailer has most, or all, of what you’re after at the best overall price.
For example: searching for the Intel i7-9700K, shows an amazing $174 difference between the cheapest and most expensive sellers!
The next time you’re looking for parts, be sure to shop around and if possible, line-up your purchase with EOFY or Christmas or other sales periods to maximise your savings.
“We see a massive uplift in business from our large online retailers during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period, approximately 15-20% for the ones who actively market during these sales”