1

Does anyone have any practical tips and tricks for dealing with this scourge?

You want to buy a product, let’s call it a widget.

You call a reseller you deal with and ask “How much is a widget please?” and they tell you it’s going to be $10.

You’re not sure if $10 is a fair price for a widget so you call a different reseller and ask “How much is a widget please?” and they tell you it will be $20.

“Why the price difference?” you ask?

“You spoke to someone else first” they say.

How is this process supposed to help me in any way whatsoever?

26 Spice ups
2

I’ve run into this too. I’m also not sure why they think I’m going to go with them when I can get it for half the price elsewhere. What is this, how dare I shop around?

3 Spice ups
3

I guess just tell em what you wanna spend and shop around until you find the lowest priced one. :smiley: This is how I’ve found my vendor peeps in the past. However, I would always email that individual and other competitors to see if I could ever get cheaper pricing. This tends to keep em on their toes. Sounds like a Monday morning though… :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Spice ups
4

I normally do most of the hardware purchases for the company I work for and this is what I deal with all of the time. Usually I tell Vendor B that Vendor A is $10. They usually respond with something like, “Well we are more than just a re seller, blah, blah, blah, so we have to charge more for our services.” They eventually match the price of vendor A, just so they can make the sale, but it’s a pain in the a$$ sometimes, mostly if you deal with some pushy sales people…

5

Keep in mind I’m not talking a few hundred bucks here, it’s potentially 10’s of thousands where nobody in their right mind will simply get one quote, and in many cases company purchasing policies will not let you get a single quote, you have to obtain multiple quotes etc.

It’s as if manufacturers live in some weird little world where their only loyalty is to their resellers rather than their customers.

If I want to buy a car in my personal life I don’t expect to be chained to the first dealer I walk into, why should IT kit be any different?

Lots of Green Guys on Spiceworks, I’d be very interested in knowing why they work this way.

3 Spice ups
6

I call company A as “ABC IT Services.”
I call company B as “DoneRight ISP.”
I call company C as “UpTime Inc.”

Then I buy from ebay.

5 Spice ups
7

I have a couple goto vendors I use all the time, and they already know how I work. I do shop around, I am willing to pay a certain premium for service, but not a large one. The thing is, you get once chance. If I call you and two other competitors and your price is out to lunch part number for part number… you don’t get a chance to fix it. Three strikes and your off the list indefinitely, I don’t expect you to have the lowest price every time, but if I look at your price and a competitor and see a notable difference, that’s a strike.

Dealing with new vendors for a specialized product, I find a few and see what they come back with, I assume at least one is trying to take me to the cleaners and work backwards from there. I may ask for clarity on many points if there is no part numbers to make sure it’s apples to apples tho.

1 Spice up
8

I have a good working relationship with my HP, Dell inside and outside sales reps. I request deal registration pricing directly from them. I have also locked Dell out of deals because they failed to provide the deal registration price to all vendors requesting quotes for something I was trying to purchase.

Took 2-3 times of writing to the reps at Dell that they would not be winning any further purchases until ALL vendors receive deal registration pricing. It is interesting to see how different vendors will mark up their prices though. I had one local MSP who is a “top” dell reseller who had marked up a deal registration price to nearly none deal reg pricing.

I have a finite list of vendors I work with now. They know they get 1 pass, their first quote has to be their best quote. I do not do the back and forth.

2 Spice ups
9

My IT Manager seems to be pretty good at dealing with these kind of purchases. I’ve never sat in a conference call with him while discussing larger purchases from re-sellers, but he was able to talk a 30 thousand server purchase to less than 15 thousand. I feel like most of it is having ALOT of patience and the other is having multiple quotes from vendors and jumping back and forth telling them their price got beat and they have to do better in order to win the purchase.

1 Spice up
10

So you go to that reseller and say “how much is a widget?” and immediately you put the phone down they call the widget maker and get deal reg.

From that point on any other reseller is at a disadvantage.

1 Spice up
11

Dunno if this helps in the slightest, but I know that the Sysadmin subreddit does a weekly thread where you can post a list of items and some verified resellers will let you know what a fair price for them should be. It used to be called “Am I Getting F***ed Friday” but I guess they toned that title down recently:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4u2x1h/fair_figure_friday_july_22_2016/

5 Spice ups
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This thread’s alter-ego is named “How I learned to hustle vendors and make them eat crow”

4 Spice ups
13

Some vendors just don’t give as good of deals. I usually expect some to be pretty high. Where I’ve found some leeway is software (where you will get gouged the most). Every vendor has told me that software has wiggle room since margins are higher, hardware appliances there is almost none.

14

With my reseller hat on I think there are good reasons for this and yes the good reasons may start with benefiting the reseller, but also are good for the end user. Many/most manufacturers sell through the channel. This has proven over the years to be both cost effective for the manufacturer and better for the end user since the channel is closer to the end users, understands their specific needs better and can speak to the larger picture besides just pushing a specific widget. Without incentives like deal registration and back end money, etc. the resellers will sell something else.

15

Specifically to this point, most deal registration discounts that I have been aware of are small enough that other resellers are not at a huge disadvantage. They are just incentivised to offer you a lower price and lose the few points of margin. This is good for you at the end of the day. Say Joe’s Computer Shack gives you a price with 5% deal reg discount built in. You can still call CDW and get the same or better price, it is just that CDW won’t make as much profit on the deal.