Competitor apparently going bump

AthlonXP1800 said:
I am not talk about multi-national or high street or out of town retailers like Amazon, Argos, Currys etc.

I am talk about UK independence PC retailers! Overclockers UK and the other largest competitor are the only 2 retailers selling full range of graphics cards, CPUs etc.

I rememebered all UK independence PC retailers names over the last 30 years. 14 Overclockers UK competitors went bust over the last 8 years so there are not many left only just a few left now. I checked endole found 3 Overclockers UK competitors has low cash in bank and high debt ratio 65%, 70% and 71%, they could go bust in the next few years likely unpaid property debts.
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Well that’s awkward because OCUK is part of a multinational group of which a majority stake is owned by private equity.
 
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The now Mike Ashley owned competitor sent me an email with black friday promotions... i clicked 'components' and to my amazement they do not sell motherboards or CPU's any more.

Be interesting to see what they sell in a years time, I know when he took over Studio they eventually started selling Frasers and Sports Direct stuff.
 
malachi said:
At this rate we be buying directly from the manufacturers.

Final nail in the coffin.
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Sadly the industry itself is shooting itself in the foot. The never ending greed.

A shame to see what has happened to the retailer in question but near the end of their mess their prices were the most unreasonable compared to other retailers, like a switch had flipped with them, from being one that had sensible pricing to just made up silly pricing, it all started around the Nvidia 30 series scalping time and then seemed to get worse and worse over the years and well, not surprised in the end this has happened to them.

I also use to suspect they were also buying manufacturer sealed B grades for some items and sold as if they were normal retail A grade versions, or manufactures would dump goods they had they couldn't sell or known issues with them or other region goods (grey goods), so why they looked cheaper than anywhere else.

I don't know really, I was always aware something was a bit off there after buying things that later I find had known issues or turn out to be none UK versions.
 
I never had a problem with said retailer... BUT last time I used them was 10 year ago or more, and 1 RMA that was ok.

On the other hand, there is another competitor that is still active (unfortunately) and I would not buy from them, had to RMA a brand new MB back in the day and was a nightmare.
 
Didn't have issues with them myself when doing an RMA, but that was a very long time ago and was Corsair RAM, so I assume it would have been a very simple b2b claim for them to recoupe.

@Kelt - Did you get anywhere with your claim? I also bought a Core HS from them (which, touch wood, has been ok so far, but), would be good to know if I'd have any support from them.

@Ace Modder - Could you confirm if there is any option of direct RMA in the event of them failing?
 
Yes, we have a direct RMA department in the Netherlands, we ask you to cover return shipping and then we cover shipping of a replacement back to you.
 
oh my i just spotted this and went to their website

80% of the good stuff is gone, they only have bare items left, such a shame as I bought with them for 20 years, last purchase was in 2024

Damn if anyone needs RMA I reckon they will be in for a bit of bother, I dont like seeing UK businesses going bust as it only hurts the community and local economy, and being made redundant isnt nice at all.
 
AthlonXP1800 said:
Ah I had lots of stuff from dabs too. What a massive shame, wished dabs never sold company to dumb BT in 2006 who ruined it decided to changed name to BT Shop in 2016 but unfortunately business went downhill lost lots of dabs customers and BT decided to changed name again to EE Shop in 2023 still failed to achieved same success as dabs did.

I had a few things from Watford Electronics since 90s, it was sad they went bust in 2007 with £3.5M debts then a company acquired assets decided to change the brand to Savastore then later Saverstore. What a dumb name, they should used Watford Electronics brand name so it was a shame they went bust in 2017 owed unpaid property rents.
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Oh I bought loads of stuff from Dabs Direct, dabs.com and Savastore back in the day. I completely forgot about them, beings back memories of me buying computer parts on the phone after seeing adverts in the magazines.
 
I work in ecommerce (very different vertical) and can't say I find all of this surprising. It's consolidation across the board, 1, maybe 2 big non-tree niche specific e-tailers and then the tree.
 
wsh said:
Funnily enough Dabs.com now forwards to the EE website. I wonder how much traffic they get via that route nowadays!
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0 traffic nowaday!

EE website is really very depressing, lots of products are out of stock, they dont have graphics cards in stock, they no longer sell CPUs, memory, HDDs, SSDs etc now compared to both dabs and BT had everything in stock years ago.
 
HoneyBadger said:
I stopped using dabs when BT took it over.
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I'd forgotten about Dabs Direct.

They started out as Dabhand Computing and were for some years an Acorn-only shop run by a single guy. My mother-in-law used his place all the time as it was only a few miles away and was most disgruntled when he started moving the business to PC. I still remember the last machine she got from them - a Risc PC with the 486 expansion card so you could boot windows (or similar) instead of RiscOS, a sort of "double decker" desktop :D The guy who ran it was well ahead of the curve in terms of using the internet for sales. He also knew when to sell :)
 
I used to use them a lot when I first started building and selling PC's in the Socket 775 days.
They had cheap PC-Chips motherboards, X300 graphics cards with Hypermemory and the super cheap foldable chairs for a quid! Being next door to Citilink helped them a lot.

I also used to be active in their forums.

It's a shame that they are gone.
 
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