Why is it important to buy as many parts as you can from one store?

[Haervii]

That's what I heard from some other guy at these forums, but most of these online shops don't have a rebate if you buy $x worth of stuff. Is there some other reason, maybe?

 

[Mears]

Well it may save you on shipping unless you buy from a price watch company that charges you $15 an item regardless. Also, it allows you to keep track of everything better and you don't have to wait for as many shipments to arrive.

 

[vi edit]

Shipping is a huge factor. The other day I got in an order that I placed at one store. It was a full PC. The monitor was a 17" trinitron and the case was a 50 pound Supermicro fulltower. I also had all of the the other esential components as well. I paid about $85 in shipping for everything.

If I had bought the monitor one place, the tower in another, the cpu at another, and so on, I may have had close to $125 in shipping charges.

The $10 or $15 that I saved on one or two parts is quickly devoured by shipping costs.

 

[Sir Fredrick]

Yeah, shipping is cheaper if you get it from just one company. When I'm building a computer, I usually end up buying parts from two different places, getting the cheapest stuff at each place, the money I save usually more than makes up for shipping.

 

[Modus]

And of course, technical support and service is simplified when you can tell the people you got all the parts from them.

Modus

 

[Buddha Bart]

KISS

Sometimes an extra $10 is worth it when 4 months down the road somthing goes wrong and you don't even know who you bought it from.

bart

 

[Shudder]

I always look at tcwo for this example.

I bought a PC, MB, memory, HDD, floppy and maybe another piece from TCWO and shipping was 17 bucks. Another place tried to charge me 53 or so. They add shipping costs to everything regardless.

Another time I ordered a -CASE-, CPU, Memory, HDD, floppy, video card, sound card, and fan from TCWO and my shipping was 26 bucks. Sure some prices were a bit higher but it all averaged out LOWER or the same, and even at the same price I know I can trust TCWO more than another lame place.

If shipping goes up normally, stick with one place. If you have 3 1/2 pound items and your shipping is 40 bucks, stay the hell away.

 

[JimMc]

They also may be more cooperative if they know you bought 9 things for $1k and want to try and return a video card or something.

 

[X14]

I'd have to say the reason would be shipping too. I recently built a new computer and ended purchasing my components all over the place and this is what I paid for shipping, remember I live in Hawaii so my shipping charges ridiculous.

CPU $22
Motherboard $20
Graphics card $23
Case $80 (this is shipping and not the cost of the case LOL)
3 different HSF $15
350W PS $8

That's what you get for living in Hawaii. You get crappy computer stores that charge you an arm an a leg for everything. And even after paying those outrageous shipping costs, it's still cheaper than if I bought stuff locally. Acutally some of the stuff I can't even buy locally so I had no choice.

Let me give you guys some current prices here in Hawaii, and these are the cheapest prices you can find:

TB1000 $560
TB800 $240
Asus A7V $200
Abit KT7 $180
Abit KT7 Raid $200
Asus CUSL2 i815 $185
P3 700E (retail version) $240
P3 933EB (retail version) $600

Can you guys say "Ripoff City", everything costs so damn much here. Do you guys know that when gas prices were under a dollar in the U.S. which was not all that long ago, gas price in Hawaii never went below $1.50, never.

 

[thorin]

1) Support
2) Shipping
3) Returns

Thorin

 

[Haervii]

What is TCWO?

 

[troubledshooter]

They got it covered

 

[Alphacowboy]

one thing nice about buying it from the Brick instead of the Click, if you have problems you can actually bring it to the store and talk to a person. Also you don't have to deal with shipping defective parts back and forth!

 

[Chuffmaster2k]

I always buy motherboards and processors locally. Everything else I will buy online. Alphacowboy hit the nail on the head when he daid if something goes wrong you can talk to somebody. I had to return two motherboards not too long ago before I got one that worked. If I was buying over the internet, that would have cost me a lot more in shipping than I could have saved. That's not even counting my time without the parts... Good Luck.

 

[Alphacowboy]

Exactly my point! I bought a SPARQ 1.0GB internal drive... I wish I remembered who because their name would be here! but it was DOA, they said they didn't have any left and that I would have to deal with Syquest... well they are out of business and the only reason I bought this was to replace one that died on me, anyway I called Syquest for a repair, they wanted 25 bucks for me to ship it to them, I then contacted the Company I bought it from, they said to bad and they wouldn't pay it! I said the hell with it and was like whatever... it sat on my desk for over a month collecting dust... I was bored one day and decided to plug it in, it worked for some reason, go figure. But my point is, if you can get it local, go for it, yeah you have to pay tax but what I have found is that the cost of shipping out cost the tax you pay! Granted I hate giving the Gov. any money but I'd rather not line someones cheep ass pockets!

 

[jonnyGURU]

I always buy my stuff locally... From my work! Then again I work for an online retailer, so can you blame me??!

(he he... I pooped on a thread)

 

[Sir Fredrick]

All the local shops near me suck an extrordinary amount of concentrated donkey ass.
Compare:
Bought computer from place a.
System was flaky, brought back to them to fix
1 week before they looked at it, they reformatted and reinstalled Windows.
Surprise! System still flaky.
brought back to place a.
Place a discovers processor was overheating due to faulty heatsink after frying the processor and damaging the motherboard.
At this point it's been over 2 weeks.
Surprise! they don't have the processor we need in stock, but if we pay the difference we can upgrade, or we can wait a week for their next shipment.

Place B (online):

First couple systems worked great
Athlon system worked at first, stopped working after about a week.
Sent a few emails back and forth with tech support, determined that motherboard was faulty. Send the MB back and got a new one, whole process took about a week.

So which is better, 1 week or 3? I stick with Place B.

 

[Citadel]

TCWO rules.

 

[SUOrangeman]

Don't forget coupons! Some site may offer huge discounts via coupons that you can only take advantage of by buying more than one component. Say a $100 off $500 coupon does nothing if you only buy a hard drive. Buy a hard drive, CPU, and memory then the savings may kick in.

-SUO, miser4life