Building Computer as a second Income.

DookieChumo said:
Hi all,

Is it possible to make a small second income building PCs and selling online?

Has anyone done this before or currently doing to now and what sort of money have you ben making?

Cheers
:cool:
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Don't do it:
1) People will want an illegal Windows.
2) People seem think that as you built them a computer then EVERY SINGLE TIME EVER that it goes wrong YOU can be called over to fix it, for free!

Honestly, if it BSOD 12 months after you built it, they will ring you up saying wtf.
 
Hxc said:
There's no money in it.
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But there is an incredible amount of hassle and evening calls as they will expect that computer supported for 10 years.. and free.

mglover070588 said:
Honestly, if it BSOD 12 months after you built it, they will ring you up saying wtf.
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Mate at work does it and he doesn't have a single evening free these days due to people calling him with malware and random stuff on the PC he sold them years ago. Even though the PC was sold as seen and second hand (most of those folks don't have a ton of money).

Honestly it's not worth it, unless you only sell to extremely well off people who will see any interaction with you as a business transaction.
 
There is no money in mainstream computers, only more customised or specialised set ups.
 
If you want to do it as a sideline because you enjoy it that's one thing, if you're expecting to make a decent income from it then I'd suggest you reconsider. It's not hard to build a PC at all now so what is it you will be doing that adds value over buying from either a big seller who are fairly cheap and therefore not with a great profit margin or a smaller bespoke seller who deals in relatively high end computers?

I've built computers for a fair few mates because they've asked (although this was a few years back now) and although I could possibly have made it slightly more profitable than it was if I'd attempted to get more custom it's a fairly high amount of hassle for a relatively limited return. All it really did was give me a chance to build a few more PCs and get a little bit of beer money or even just getting paid in beer.
 
DookieChumo said:
Hi all,

Is it possible to make a small second income building PCs and selling online?

Has anyone done this before or currently doing to now and what sort of money have you ben making?

Cheers
:cool:
Click to expand...

It's possible to do this, yes.

You will lose money on it though. Definitely. The slightest glitch and it'll be your fault. Any new hardware which doesn't work, your fault. Any new software that doesn't work, your fault. They format the HDD, your fault.

Don't do it, just don't.
 
You will lose money on it though. Definitely. The slightest glitch and it'll be your fault. Any new hardware which doesn't work, your fault. Any new software that doesn't work, your fault. They format the HDD, your fault.

Don't do it, just don't.


This..


I build a few pcs for friends, but before I do it, I tell them im not tech support as well if it goes wrong.
 
You can make money selling to friends/family because you have a reputation and can sell pc's a lot cheaper than the major retailers which rip people off. However selling to the general public is not going to get you anywhere these days.
 
I did this for a year and do it now too but only as a hobby. Let me me tell you my problems.

First of all the fees wernt too much of a problem as i put hte PC up for buy it now and included the fees in the profit margin.

The first few PC's i sold were fine however one of them got a dent in the case due to the courier. So he wanted a partial refund of £30 or send hte whole thing back. I figured i could claim of the courier but i found out i had to show evidence.

Second time someone had bout a PC and changed my 4650 to a broken 4650 they had and sent the PC back saying it doesnt work. I lost the paypal case and had to refund them as i did not jot down the gpu serial number.

Thrid the other person asked me to oc the cpu so i did a little. When he got it he decided to oc it further and blew the pc. he sent it back saying it doesnt work.

Fourth time i sold and oc'd q8400 pc and the courier company i dont know how had managed to get the box soaked. So when the customer opened it everything was wet. I lost £600 beucase the courier never payped out.

And there has been other times where people have flashed bios wrong and want to send it back. They have taken all the parts out and fiddled with the, etc...

Once they take it to paypal you've had it.

i now say if there is a problem you must contact me in 12 hours or eelse go somewhere else
 
Stick an ad in the local paper to do support, go out to people's houses and charge a fixed hourly rate.

My g/f's brother does this and makes a respectable wage from doing so, he's got a good client base and covers everything from new installs of store bought PCs, builds, upgrades, home theatre setups, networking etc.. Something you should be more than capable of doing too if you're building PCs.

This way you get to supply based on requirements, and configure/install without the hassle of being solely responsible for the hardware. i.e the onus is on the vendor to provide that.
 
schizo220168 said:
spie seem's to do quite well from it.
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That's economies of scale for you.

OCUK never used to offer pre-built systems - they can afford to do that now as they have support staff to deal with problems and customer queries/returns, etc. Something that you can't do with just one person.
 
Another point is that, if you look at 'spec me' threads, there is often a PC on overclockers website that matches what they want and at the same price that they are going to spend anyway. Sometimes I'll post a link to the PC but almost always they arn't interested. They want to build their own, which is fair enough but if you take that aspect of it away, what's the point. A person who has no interest in putting a PC together has the option of buying from somewhere like here or from a small advert in the paper. Unless you could sell an £800 PC for £500 then no one would be interested.

I've never heard of someone paying a stranger to build a PC but I have heard of people who ring small adverts that offer DVD-RW fitted for £40 and 500gb HDD fitted for £70 etc. Not too many compatability issues with those, only IDE/SATA and maybe have a few molex splitters to hand. Maybe fitting Blu-ray drives might be popular. Not a huge profit margin but you would only be out of the house for an hour.
 
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