Short survey please help

[h diy]

I am starting a PC building business and need some community feedback and research. The survey is quick and should only take 2mins. Thank You.

[SupaKomputa]

well if you asked that kind of questions in here, may not be the right place, as most of people here want to build it them self.

 

[UpTheDons]

As someone stated above this is probably a bad place to conduct this, most people on here are enthusiast PC builders so you wont get accurate results compared to your most likely target audience (general consumers wanting a PC without any hassle).Another side note to this, alot of people come on here and ask questions about starting up something like this. PC building as a business is incredibly hard to make any money in, with shipping, warranty issues etc. I mean unless you know that you have a good enough base to run this in your local area, its basically not worth it.

[h diy]

ok, thank you.

[LogicalDrm]

Furhtermore, this forum is for international audience. Local availability of prudcts as well as prices (and in your case effect of Brexit) will be more important to whether people go with prebuild or build themselves.

[Kavamale21]

so if we look to results option to sell kits. offer systems with all parts with choice to prebuild for small charge or let customer do it themself. benefit for customer that all parts come in single delivery and with upgraded instruction maybe some tips for best perfomance after build. or just partial build ( like fans radiators preinstaled rgb hubs previred and so on) it still leave less experenced people chance to finish build and got that first build pride.

[mariushm]

Some comments ...

 

office pc vs gaming pc vs workstation pc

 

By workstation pcs a lot of people think of certified video cards (quadro , radeon pro etc) and often ecc memory which are expensive and often not needed, unless required explicitly by some software (autocad, 2d and 3d rendering rendering etc)

 

Some people will say they want a workstation pc but they'll actually think about a pc that can be used to render youtube videos or encode and stream to Twitch, so it would be best to ask for how they plan to use the pc.

 

These days, a lot of office pcs can have a second role as a gaming pc ... there's quite a few processors with integrated graphics that can play modern games. Adding a video card will often bring a computer close to the performance of a "gaming pc"

 

If you do decide to start up a business i would suggest these strongly

Please please please don't give in and resort to building computers with 20 pound power supplies or power supplies that came with the case, to make more profit. It will come back and byte you in the ass. If you care about reputation, you're better off losing a potential sale than selling systems that people will be pissed about in a year or two when the power supplies fail, or the fans in the power supply start to be vibrate or crap out.

Find some cheap stuff from manufacturers with good reputation and don't accept worse product to make it cheaper.

 

Do the same for keyboards. Rather than including a free keyboard, you'll be better off not including something cheap that will frustrate the buyer daily. I'd say don't even stock anything that costs less than 10-15 pounds. My previous keyboard was a 11 pounds Microsoft Wired 600 keyboard, now I use a 20-25 pounds Logitech k280e keyboard.

 

If people come to order in store, have a bunch of cheap keyboard models in store and let people try typing on them and let them decide what keyboard feels best for them. It take a few more minutes for someone to place an order but you'll most likely gain a repeat customer.

 

Unless you get a motherboard with only 2 memory slots and buyer picks low amount of memory, always try to install 2 sticks of ram, for dual channel mode, it's free performance. 

Maybe consider offering something like "we will buy back the memory sticks if you want to upgrade to more memory" kinda deal for those that will pick motherboards with only 2 memory slots.

 

[SupaKomputa]

There are still a opportunity with this, you can offer an installation service, which is for people who bought the parts themselves and bring it all to you for the installation. There are still a lot of people who want to build a DIY PC, but doesn't have the experience and are afraid to do it. But you have to encourage them to troubleshoot problem themselves by finding the solution online like in this forum. If not you will only be terrorize by whiny kids that got panic attack everytime the PC having problems and blame it on you. Never say you guarantee the PC will be problem free, PC will always have problems even if the hardware is  in perfect condition. 

[Chiyawa]

I think you might want to add something for question number 1:

Buy my own PC parts and have someone build it for you.

 

That's because many are not comfortable building their own PC for fear they might break something.