Geeks.com Online Shop Has Closed

Duggeek writes "After 17 years, one of the best kept secrets in shopping, Geeks.com, has shuttered its online doors. Myself, I have a small book of sales orders from years past. According to the latest announcement, that stack will not be growing any larger. Quoting: 'Our vision has always been to provide the geeky tech consumer an alternative avenue to purchase quality refurbished and new techy products and gadgets. That vision was the cornerstone of our slogan "Best Deals Every Nanosecond." Unfortunately after a lot of difficult consideration the owners of Geeks.com feel we are unable to come through on this vision any longer. There are many why's... The e-commerce landscape, as well as the consumer electronics market, has changed dramatically with intense competition and a 1000lb gorilla (do we really need to say who) competitor that can lose millions of dollars to buy customers and suck up inventory. They can lose money with impunity, supported by the stock market. We cannot.' The landing page of their website now goes directly to this announcement; the storefront is switched off. They maintain a Facebook page where a combination of remorse and surprise is rapidly growing. The letter also asserts that they will fulfill all business obligations to online customers during their transition to both a solitary, brick-and-mortar presence in California and a wholesale division, Evertek. Personally, just about every keyboard in my closet was purchased from them, and another box full of USB devices as well. Five of my PC builds exist because of them. Feel free to share your own memories of the former Computer Geeks Discount Outlet."

Comments

You should have told me it existed!

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, I never heard of it before, it never showed up in my searches for parts.

Hint, you can't have a successful business if you don't tell people about it!

Word of mouth only works for drug dealers.

Re:You should have told me it existed!

[war4peace]

Same here. And I've been browsing the Internet for a long time, looking for geeky stuff.
Oh well...

Re:You should have told me it existed!

[Seumas]

Yep. Never heard of it. *shrug*

Then again, I've only been online for 24 years.

Re:You should have told me it existed!

[Rizimar]

The focus of Geeks.com was largely on refurbished equipment, but when your customers have options like Amazon, Overstock, and Newegg, it is hard to compete. I've been following them for a couple of years, always getting notices of their latest deals in my inbox, and it seemed like they had a lot of the same sorts of products on sale: 1TB internal hard drives, 23" monitors, and always a ton of the same Dell desktop computers that had features that might would have been acceptable in an office environment a couple of years ago (limited RAM and hard drive space, sometimes with a basic Windows install). They recently started offering a lot of first-generation iPads for a couple hundred dollars each as well.

Part of the problem is that customers new to Geeks will quickly lose interest if they bought one of those items because the inventory never really changed, and the deals were always around the same price points. In a market where newer items often sport better features and tend to get cheaper over time for the amount of power and functionality you get, there's less incentive to turn to a refurbished marketplace, especially for such a limited selection of hardware.

Re:You should have told me it existed!

[mysidia]

They recently started offering a lot of first-generation iPads for a couple hundred dollars each as well.

A couple hundred? I got a second generation iPad on eBay for a couple hundred, not too long ago.

I'm sure there's a market for folks buying iPad1s, but they've got to get a deep enough discount acquiring the refurbished equipment to sell them for a "fair" price.

They make it out to be the big online retailers selling at a loss -- when it's not. Something was broken with Geeks' business model, or the execution -- it worked once, but the environment changes over time.

Re:You should have told me it existed!

[sconeu]

Exactly. This sounds like a place that I would have used... IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT IT.

Re:You should have told me it existed!

[ChatHuant]

I wonder about the wisdom of advertising on a site dedicated to a community that has both a very negative view of ads and the technical knowhow to block them...

Re:You should have told me it existed!

[mysidia]

There's a niche for a company that sells refurbished equipment at a higher price than eBay but offers a more polished experience. Either geeks.com didn't execute or they didn't get the word out.

You mean that there used to be a niche... back when eBay was young.

The people who want a polished experience go to the retail stores. The people who want to save as much money as possible, and are willing to take risks and extra work to save money dig through local newspaper classifieds around the country and craigslist; the people willing to take risks look around at night for strangers selling iPads out of their trunk for $20 each.

eBay IS the middle ground that provides the more polished experience; albeit not as polished as a pawn shop or an authorized retailer or used car store.

Arguably, the size of the niche in terms of things in between eBay, and the retail channel has been shrinking very much over the past 10 years, as eBay sees its user base and number of transactions continue to expand, and a dismal economy favors eBay even more.

So that supposed niche; might be too small for anyone to have a reasonable chance of success in that business, at the current time. Times change. 10 years from now, after Amazon's finally met their reckoning and had to raise prices.... the ecommerce scene might be very different

Re:You should have told me it existed!

[hedwards]

I used to shop at computergeeks.com, which was then geeks.com and quite frankly the service was abysmal. Early on it wasn't so bad, but about the time I stopped shopping there they stopped bothering to even fill out the specifications on the things they were selling. The last order I made with them was to use a credit I had from returning the previous thing. The Bluetooth head set didn't work right, and I found out that it was incompatible, but they didn't bother to fill in the specs. I didn't even bother to return it as it would have cost me more to return it, just to get another store credit.

It used to be a decent shop, but this was a self inflicted wound, I'm just surprised they lasted as long as they did, considering how crappy the service had gotten.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

They used to be "Comp Geeks"

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I bought my DEC Alpha Multias from them... Same machine Malda started Slashdot on. I had two...

Also got a couple of nice Seimens-made web-terminals, which I converted to low-noise firewalls with Astaro.

Foolish

[iamhassi]

You don't shutdown, you adapt: newegg, amazon, sears and even walmart adapted to the ebay model, so now sellers can sell their own merchandise on amazon and newegg and buyers don't even know the difference. Only way you can tell is it says "item provided by $SELLERS_NAME" somewhere. That way geeks.com wouldn't need any merchandise, they would just operate the domain and hosting and take a percentage of every sale.

Going to miss them

[ToasterTester]

I discovered them years ago and bought from them both for myself, but also companies I worked for. Their customer service was great. All the best with the store front.

The mega corporations are buying up or pushing out of business all the small businesses. I recently sold by house and moved and in process used a lot of local businesses. Talking with them most were saying they will probably be gone in 3-4 years. The big corporations are cutting deals with cash strapped cites for major concessions that are driving the little guys out with extra fees, permits, and licenses.

"one of the Best kept secrets in shopping"...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well there's your problem right there...

The funny thing about this...

[Red_Chaos1]

...is that it all comes from one warehouse location there in Oceanside. I worked for them for a short time as a temp. It was a less than fond experience, but that's beside the point. All merchandise for the 3 arms of the company come from the same stock. I forget what the 3rd company name they sold under was, but the items you bought under geeks.com was the same stuff you bought "wholesale" under evertek.com. I can only guess at why they feel the need to end the online arm of geeks.com if the store part will remain open, and the other arms (if the third still operates) use the same pool of stock. I will say this, they sold a lot of things that I wouldn't bother going to Newegg for because it would cost more.

Re:The funny thing about this...

[RudyHartmann]

There are 3 companies. Genica, Evertek, and Geeks. They're 2 blocks away from me in Temecula, California. Only the brick and mortar retail store is in Oceanside now. If you're a business, you can still buy from Evertek. I think they just bailed out of the online retail business. They have a pretty huge warehouse right here in Temecula. I just got the email notice, so I'm not sure what the rest of all this means yet. I'll find out more Monday though.

A sad day

[a9db0]

I can't remember how long I've been a Geeks customer - years. I've bought laptops, CPUs, memory, and miscellaneous hardware from them over the years. They were always a great place to check when you needed an older or oddball piece of hardware - often times they had it. Great service, great people.

You will be missed.

Amazon

[rsilvergun]

I'm assuming he means Amazon.com. Newegg is big, but hardly a 1000lb gorilla, and there really isn't anyone else major selling anything online. Amazon's investors are basically taking a huge loss right now with the assumption that Amazon will be the next Walmart. e.g. you'll get everything from them and when that happens they'll jack up prices.

Makes me wonder what America's going to do. Amazon and Walmart are putting the last of the mid sized companies out of business. They're already show that when that happens prices go way up (Amazon did it for books, Walmart does it in every market they take over). Are we gonna suck it down and just live worse or will we regulate them with the gov't?

You can complain about the megcorps but....

[DigitalReverend]

They didn't become mega corps by being " best kept secrets in shopping". There's been a lot of this on /. where some little known entity is shutting down their website or closing their doors. I think too many people actually believe in the field of dreams, but I am sorry, just because you build it, they aren't necessarily going to come, unless you tell them about it.

Re:That actually makes me sad

[itwasgreektome]

To me, it was always "Computer geeks" or "compgeeks." The plain geeks.com wasn't familiar to me. Like when Facebook used to be thefacebook.com, and later changed it; for a long while I insisted on still writing out thefacebook.com cause it felt wrong to shorten it, not being true to it's original state.

Re:1000 lb gorilla

[beltsbear]

They are probably referring to Amazon, but Newegg has probably taken more of their business. I do not see Newegg loosing huge sums of money on older inventory.

As a former reseller and heavy previous buyer from their sister company Evertek.com, we slowed our pace greatly when geeks.com came out as they were undercutting us on many deals straight to the consumer. They also sometimes kept stock on geeks.com that they sold out on evertek.com which left us with a bad taste.

Re:1000 lb gorilla

[ranton]

As everyone knows they were talking about Amazon, but I assume your question was about the "lose money with impunity supported by the stock market" comment. Amazon is not a very profitable company. In fact Amazon it often takes losses quarters on end. I don't have the time to search for the actual figures, but I am pretty sure they have been operating at a loss since 3rd quarter 2012.

Wall Street still keeps their stock price up because of rising revenues so Amazon can borrow money with impunity to make up for these losses. This allows them to keep dropping prices even when they are losing money. A small company cannot do this. It isn't hard to raise revenues when you don't have to care about profitability or cash flow when setting your prices. This is why Geek.com was complaining that Wall Street allows large companies to succeed with business models which would put SMBs out of business.

I am not commenting on whether this is a good thing, but it is undeniable that it is happening.

Thank you geeks.com!

[kninja]

I should have placed another order last month. I need a few things.

I loved Geeks.com, for buying extra cables for internal builds, tiny mice for laptops, hard drive mounting brackets, and all these little things you need to keep in stock for builds. My current graphics card (GTX460 for $90) and laptop mouse came from geeks.com.

If the owners are reading this, thank you guys for the good service over the years. I've been recommending you since 1999.

If you start up a leaner or updated business model, send out an email to your former customers and let us know.

Domain name for sale?

[gd2shoe]

I suspect one of the real points to this article is to let interested buyers know that the domain name may be for sale soon (to pump up the price). I'm sure that is one asset that has greatly appreciated over the years.

Re:1000 lb gorilla

[datavirtue]

Agreed, Amazon is not losing money. It is however reinvesting all profit aggressively. It is thriving, growing, and slated to rock Wal-Mart (which is starting to look VERY incompetent next to Amazon). Try using Wal-Mart Site-to-Store a few times if you want more inconvenience and trouble than it's worth. Amazon is investing to establish this service, that is why Wal-Mart started it in the first place.