Geeks.com Online Shop Has Closed 187
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."
You should have told me it existed! (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.
"one of the Best kept secrets in shopping"... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well there's your problem right there...
Re:You should have told me it existed! (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.
You can complain about the megcorps but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Amazon (Score:2, Insightful)
DUUUH I will buy wherever it's cheaper DUUUUUH I don't care about brick and mortar stores DUUUUH they are too expensive and if they can't compete they should go out of busines DUUUUUUUH I don't feel sorry for them, they should have found another job. DUUUH i don't care if they had the store for 30 years and are about to retire, it's their fault because they should have adapted DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRR.
There's your answer. Look around slashdot and you'll see the average geek is a lot like the average person. They only care about the lowest price TODAY.
Re:You should have told me it existed! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.