The pros and cons of buying hardware from your IT support company

How do you purchase your new IT hardware?

In this episode of Techcess, I'll be talking you through the various pros and cons of purchasing your IT assets from your IT support company, versus sourcing the equipment yourself!

In today's world, technology is the backbone of most businesses and without it, let's just say things wouldn't go very smoothly.

If you listen to the episode I go in depth on all the various positives and negatives of buying from an IT support company like ours at m3 Networks.

So what are the pros and cons of buying your hardware from your IT support company?

The pros

As you'll know if you're a regular listener to the Techcess podcast, we are here to serve you, first and foremost. We're not here to sell anything more than free advice. 

That's why I'm able to give you a very honest rundown of the many benefits of buying from an IT support company like us, as well as being upfront about the disadvantages.

Let's start with the pros, shall we? These are:

Convenience

Familiarity

After sales support

Integration

And now on to the cons...

In the grand scheme of things, you'd have to be really picky to actually consider these to be cons.

But in the interests of balance and transparency (which you'll know I always like to be if you're connected with me or following me on LinkedIn!) I wanted to list some potential ones for you.

They are:

Limited options

Cost

Conflict of interest

But.. overall, you should definitely remember you're not the IT expert....

Excerpt from episode 89 of Techcess

(Download transcript)

"Buying from your IT company is in most cases going to be more expensive than buying online. Now, I alluded to this earlier when I talked about the after sales support and how paying a little bit more can be a good thing. But often what is a pro can also be a con. Your IT company will add a markup to the price, which means you're going to pay a bit more for the same thing. Of course there's also the feel good factor knowing you're spending money with another local business, helping to put food on the table for local families instead of adding to the huge profits posted by large online retailers. But you can have the internal discussion with your own ethical compass in that one. And for a lot of people I know, this is actually quite important to them. But the one thing I'd say here though is that in most cases the customer just looks at the cost of the thing they are buying. What you need to consider is that it takes time to spec out a solution. Quotes just don't build themselves. So the extra that you pay isn't just because your IT company are more expensive for that product. They've invested time into doing this for you and that's included in the profit that they make in the hardware."

Tech Topics covered in this episode of Techcess:

• The options for purchasing your office IT equipment
• Where you absolutely SHOULDN'T be considering buying it from!
• The pros of buying from your IT support company
• The cons of buying from your IT support company
• What you can do to make it go smoothly if you are about to purchase some IT equipment