Originally posted by: jpeyton
Are you saying your selling price is less than $4 higher than your cost? If so, that sucks man. Are you guys doing that to get the word out about your site?
In regards to you shipping faster, I'll hold my judgement for now. I just have a hard time believing a smaller operation like you guys would have retail X2's in stock weeks before Newegg, Monarch, Mwave, and Tiger.
But as you mentioned, there is no harm in pre-ordering from you guys because you don't charge until it ships.
I'm happy to level with you and tell your or markup on every item is the same. This means if you buy a $15 SATA cable from us, or a $1000 processor, we make exactly the same amount of money.
The price we charge for our X2's is actually about ~$10-20 more than what we pay. However, we have to pay our employees, our credit card processing fees, advertising, leases, insurance, shipping, etc, which means our per item profit on pretty much anything is between $2-4 typically. What this means is that on a single item sale, we definitely don't make much. Especially when I have one of our employees spend 20 minutes filling the order and helping the customer, it's more reasonable to say we make almost nothing, and sometimes even lose money. However, if someone comes in and buys 4-5 things from us, then we're better off.
We price this way for a variety of reasons. First off, this business is cut-throat. If we priced any higher, we'd get no sales. Secondly, pricing higher is a dis-service to our customers. That might sound like a stupid answer, but myself and the other owner were shoppers long before starting our business, so we have chosen to retain the customer perspective on things. Lastly, using a single pricing model for every product makes management a lot easier. We actually carry about 80,000 items (only a fraction of which on are on the website; we sell the others by special request and to our larger accounts) so to individually price each one is a logistical nightmare.
As for our being able to ship sooner; honestly, there is a chance it won't happen. In that event, we are going to immediately notify all our pre-order customers and let them know, so that they can hold out or order elsewhere. That's only fair. As of right now, we are still showing the 7th as the date, so it's still looking good.
Hopefully that answers all your questions!
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