Become a reseller

Hello guys

Looking around to buy a Clevo which as we know are sold by various resellers round the world, and I have been doing a casual, gossipy type, due diligence, and been checking out some firms, you know you may just discover that the "firm" is just a single bloke operating from his mum's attic, anyway, I was wondering, what does it take to become a Clevo reseller, does not seem to be a bad business to be in. What would the initial outlay be, how many Clevos would I have to order from Taiwan/China to start with ? Would the factory let me order just one? Would they let me order piece by piece (eg order directly from the factory after the customer has paid me in full and have the factory ship to him directly) ?

Thanks guys

 

Hi @doofus99

That's a huge question and I could write an essay about it for you to be honest! Some key and short points for now:

- The MOQ (minimum order quantity) from Clevo is very high, there's no chance that you would be able to purchase directly from them to start with. Most companies would take a number of years to build their level to the point where they could purchase direct from Clevo - of course an existing company which wants to move into laptops would have more purchasing power. Thus the only way for you to start would be to find a company (for example like us) who sells barebones to other companies. You can then purchase individual chassis as needed and build your business up from then.
- How are you going to market your company, will it be full time, website, staff, how will you take payment etc etc? You can do it through EBay or Amazon, but in order to have a successful and long term business model you need to do more than rely on sales from an existing sales platform/market place.
- You're correct in that quite a few companies are actually just one or two people working from home or from a small office. This is how lots of companies start of course and there's nothing wrong with this at all - but you need to be extremely careful how you run things and that you don't promote yourself as an established company with a large facility. This can very quickly lead you into trouble, with cashflow, staffing issues, stock acquiring and so on.
- Support, production (where will you get components from for example), RMA etc - without these in place you'll very quickly have bad feedback and loose customers

I would start by contacting direct Clevo customers that are close to your location and ask them what they offer in terms of barebones sales, fulfilment (build and ship your order in full, rather than just barebone sales) and so on. But if you have no experience in building, selling or supporting this type of hardware it's an extremely steep learning curve.

 

Thanks for the insights, much appreciated.

 

Then there is competition in your region, how are you going to make yourself stand out? What niche will you fill?

 

Was that question directed to me?

Oh that's easy, I have noticed *huge* price discrepancies, it is either outright fraud or there are *huge* margins. All resellers sell the same Clevo models and with the exact same spec, in the same country many times, you cannot have £1,500 discrepancy on a £4,000 item.

Now I know you will go on to talk about customer service, the support of a stable and large company, etc etc...

For example

Clevo P775TM1 17.3" UHD, i7-8700K, 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD + 1TB HD, 2 or 3 year warranty and 1 year screen warranty == from £2477 in the UK to £3200 in Germany ...

If we look at the P870TM1 the differences are even larger...

 

And in my experience when the above cr*p happens sometimes the merchants get together and fix their prices, like OPEC, it's a cartel of sorts...

 

You sure that's not just related to local taxes and/or trade protectionism?

 

aha, yes, comparing between *major* EU countries same levels of tax, same everything really...

 

I can guarantee you and everyone else on here that there is no price fixing between merchants, there's no RRP, there are no secret discussions between companies to set pricing or carve up the market.

 

I cannot tell whether there is price fixing or not, I just suggested that this is one of the things that happen in a "protected" market.

As I have shown above, there are vendors selling the same laptops for +30% extra without any justification. Eg the P775TM1-G costs from £2,500 to £3,200 - same specs, same everything. Actually the £2,500 comes with better warranty.

Look at individual components while configuring a laptop:

Samsung SSD 500gb 960 Evo - reseller charges 270 to 312 euros --- Amazon/ebay price 180 to 205 euros : reseller charges 65 to 105 euros extra for simply slotting someone else's product into the back.

And to consider that resellers buy trade and pay much less what the customer would pay on the open market.

But there are some Clevo vendors who are not as greedy, and actually PASS THEIR TRADE DISCOUNTS ONTO THE CLIENTS.

Examples

Intel 500gb SSD 760p - reseller charges 171 euros - Amazon price 200 euros
Samsung SSD 500gb 960 Evo - reseller charges 180 euros - Amazon price 180-205 euros

That is a good reseller in my opinion.

And if we look at panels, TN, IPS, FHD / UHD it gets much worse. A panel costing 140 euros on the open market gets charged at 270 euros extra and they are keeping the previous panel...

So to answer the initial question, there is huge space for arbitrage as I have shown.

 

I mean you have clearly no idea how to run a business. You have no mindset for this kind of thing, you have no business plan, no marketing strategies, no budget, no experience whatsoever. Running a business is not as simple as just buy something from taiwan and selling it for cheap, especially when we consider how trash clevo notebooks are tuned. You will likely make people angry rather than helping them. There are companies like HIDEvolution who have a very good price to "mod" ratio, which justifies their prices as well, youd have to run against competition all the time which you clearly cannot go up against. Just drop the idea.

 

Unless you have somehow read my CV and my income tax statements YOU clearly have no idea who I am.

Maybe you would like to take these comments to a Mr Michael Dell...



I should say this is a discussion and not a flame war. I never said that anyone "had no idea" about anything, I am simply looking at and comparing prices. I did not invent these prices, they are real from multiple companies websites and are all true as of this morning.

You want to pay 240 euros for something that costs 100 euros Be my guest. Who has "no idea" then becomes academic.

 

Too far on this one. Too agressive towards the user directly.

 

Agree completely, I'll try and address the OPs points in a slightly less hostile manner than previously attempted!!!

Our website price for that specification, at todays exchange rate with 2 year full warranty is around £2,600. If you have seen the same specification for sale for £3,200, on a private company website, I can tell you that they aren't selling any at that price, or the price is a mistake.

What some people do, mostly on Amazon, is that they put a product up for sale with a grossly inflated price. It hardly costs anything to list the laptop on Amazon, so it doesn't matter if they don't sell it, but if someone does buy it the seller makes a huge profit margin. They would then buy the laptop from the manufacturer (or a reseller) and sell it to their Amazon customer at the higher price. This isn't Amazon's fault, I'm just using it as one example.

Fair enough and no problem, I just wanted to quash the idea so that it didn't start to run into a wider discussion unnecessarily.

As above, I don't expect you to name and shame any companies on here in public but I highly doubt that any company is successfully selling the P775 with that spec for £3,200. They might be selling it at that price, but no one's buying it in Germany at that price - I can pretty much guarantee that because I know our price and I know our place in the market.

There have been big sways in the price of memory recently, this is because of a shortage caused by issues including demand for GPUs for crypto currency mining, some large tech companies buying up all the memory prior to new mobile phone manufacturing runs and launches (which happens at least one a year and can bump RAM prices up by as much as 25%) and so on. On EBay and Amazon, quite a lot of the SSDs being sold are grey imports so they can easilly undercut the legitimate sources for SSDs through distribution in Europe.

What you can see with your Samsung 500GB 960 EVO example is laptop manufacturers who buy hundreds of SSDs at a time still having stock they purchased when the price jumped because of the explination I gave above. Samsung are selling on Amazon at todays sale price, not from 2 weeks ago for example.

Though your points seem to make sense on paper, it's really way more more complicated than it seems at first glance.

If someone sees a laptop for £3,200 and £2,500, they're not going to buy the £3,200 one unless there's a rediculously good reason. Same with the SSDs. Though the differences exist, it's not a specific problem you can take advantage of IMO because then you'd just be competing with all the other companies who already offer lower prices and have low margin business models. I've seen it happen time and time again, they aren't sustainable businesses and you unfortunately see them dissappear after around 2 years.

 

Nah it's a matter of perspective really.
Dragging someone down to reality rather than let him possibly ruin his life is too far in my oppinion. Sometimes you need to be harsh in order to make people understand, I mean you own a business and you know what I'm saying is true, so before the guy does something rekless and gets himself into a position where he possibly would be a financial wrek I'll be hard on him.

 

Thank you for taking the time to describe all this, this is very kind of you.

I can't comment because then I'd be mentioning individual resellers and I will not do that.

However being a thorough person I record configuration prices in Excel (I do almost everything on Excel) and I can send you some data. I am not sure how to email you privately though, I do not think the site allows emails to be shown. My email is sharesandgames on gmail if you wish.

Again, thanks for spending the time to reply.

 

Without mentioning any names, here is a random spec I made up - and for the *exact* same spec, prices vary from £2,500 to £3,200 in EU.

Clevo P775TM1-G, UHD 4K, G-Sync, i7-8700K, 32GB 2400MHZ RAM, Samsung 960 Evo 500, 1000MB Firecuda, 2 years collect+return

£2,500 to £3,200 represents almost a 30% increase...

 

Could be interesting - thanks, feel free to send it to me attached to a pm on the forum, I'll have a look at it when I have a couple of minutes free.

 

you should offer a @Prema Bios and some mods like delidded cpus or repaste with really good thermal compound or also LM. there are so few @Prema partners in Europe

 

So? Are you willing to sell same specd laptop for less than 2500 pounds? What's going to be your leverage? There are resellers with cheap Clevo notebooks and piss-poor customer service and support, and there're with not-so-cheap notebooks and better consumer service.