Becoming a Reseller in the Computer Business

In this article we talk about becoming a reseller, how to keep your prices down (and your profits up) and the dangers to watch out for.

A reseller is what you are if you are going to sell computer parts. There are many places you can become a reseller of parts and typically by doing so you can get better prices than other people. However, this isn’t always the case. For example, if you are buying parts from warehouses that need to be sent via post, sometime the price of the parts with the postage cost on top is more than if you brought it outright down at mom and pops computer store.

This is not a good way to do business because once you put your own markup on top of the price you paid you are already more expensive than everyone else and you are stuck with stock you cant sell.

For whole computers, you can keep an eye out for specials that may appear at the wholesalers, buy them at that time and resell them. This way you can still put your markup on it and remain competitive price-wise.

If you are the type of person who likes building complete systems, you can assemble them yourself for about a third of what you can sell them for which allows you to put a nice markup on them.

As for inventory such as USB memory sticks, hard drives, wireless keyboard and mice packages and wireless routers, if you have multiple reseller accounts with multiple suppliers you can continually find good discounts all year round.

If you plan to stock up inventory for your business, only keep a handful of the smaller things such as hard drives, video cards and CPU’s as these are very vulnerable to spoilage which we wrote about in a previous article titled “Inventory and the Danger of Spoilage”. As for higher end items such as LCD screens, if you keep only one of each type on hand at all times then that is good enough. Never try to stock up like the big brand stores because you won’t be able to sell as quickly as they do.