Working With Dell: Getting Your Discounts The Easy Way
The examples in this page assume you are buying PCs adequate for most professional office computing activities. High-demand applications like photo, video editing and gaming generally require more expensive computers,
but the same purchasing principles apply. We've included links to pages that will help you make appropriate choices given your needs.
Dell makes a well-designed machine and ranks in the upper echelon of customer satisfaction ratings.
They show up when things break with the parts they need, but buying form Dell is like buying from a car from GM: lots of different product lines with similar products that look different, and a very compliated pricing model that makes intelligent buying difficult.
You can save 15-30% on the machine Dell machine you want if you're willing to spend 2-5 hours shopping their web site. It's a lot of work for one computer, but it adds up fast if your re-equipping your whole office.
What Not To Buy.
As a general rule, don't buy printers, televisions, electronics, accessories like USB flash drives, small office routers and switches.
You can almost always buy better products for a lot less money elsewhere.
Buy Specs
Dell's web site is set up by market: products for
HOME, OFFICE &
DATA CENTER.
Most new basic PCs will give you all you need to run every program you might use in your office (see the chart below).
Bait and Switch?
Dell machines are always priced "from" something. If you follow their web links to a PC priced "from $339", you will almost be certianly be taken to a similar PC with a better processor, more memory, a bigger hard drive and a higher price.
You can recongifure most quotes using Dell's "Customize" option, but it takes a surprising amount of tweaking to get back to the advertised price and considerable expertise to understand the many choices you have to make. Let's make it simple.
Email, web-browsing, word processing, spreadsheets, and power point take very little computing power. Photo and video editing, TV, graphics, specialty applications
and specialized programming software require more power. We'll stick
(Learn more about picking computers.)
A good basic office machine will have the following specs:
The Small Business Sales teams will tell you that they can always offer you a better deal than you can find in Dell's website.
We have never found that to be true. The web site features loss leaders: the small business sales department has to turn a profit on its orders.
If you're paying with cash or credit card, your job is finding loss leaders on the web site - not
The bottom line is that you can generally do better by configuraing and buying on line if your willing to make multiple
pricing tries with their on line systems. It takes some time, but we think it's worth a couple of hours to save $100 per PC or more when you're buying in bulk.
A Working Example.
This morning we priced basic desktop PCs for a client. Dell offers similar basic desktop PCs in its Inspiron, Optiplex and Vostro product ines. Using the Dell website, we priced
each model several times with different Dell deal codes.
We asked, "What's to prevent us from having three people place orders for 5 units each at the lower price".
"Nothing", they said.
We asked, "What's to prevent us from taking advantage of the special 4% lease rate if we order 5 machines at a time".
"Nothing", they said.
We asked, "Why the heck can't you just stop this silliness and simplify this order for us?"
"It's against Dell's policy. We could get fired" they said.
