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Geeks.com Online Shop Has Closed

Posted by Soulskill on from the fare-thee-well dept.

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."

6 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. You should have told me it existed! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:You should have told me it existed! by Seumas · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yep. Never heard of it. *shrug*

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

    2. Re:You should have told me it existed! by Rizimar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:You should have told me it existed! by sconeu · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

      --
      General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
  2. "one of the Best kept secrets in shopping"... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well there's your problem right there...

  3. Re:1000 lb gorilla by ranton · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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