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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."
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.
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.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
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.
Well there's your problem right there...
...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.
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.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
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.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.