There  are many good .com retail companies out there. Priceline.com and even Ebay can be good. BUT any pricing you are guaranteed online you should take to your local Computer store and see if they can come close to it. Most shops will attempt to go as low as they can to match the price. If you add in shipping from the .com place you will see that in a lot of cases its better to stick to your local retailer. The biggest advantage that local stores have over .coms is thier return policy. Local stores, if you have a bad product, will replace with no SHIPPING cost. A .com you may have to pay for shipping. I am NOT saying that you cant go with a .com, if the price is low enough you should GO for it. As always with .coms AND local stores check them out FIRST!

Jim
Hardware Systems Engineer

Butchrecon is right about checking out the pricing if you have the time and the energy.  Sometimes I just don't care about the price as much as the convenience.  I have had good luck so far with Microwarehouse, though I have ordered from just the catalog so far, they have good customer service and I'm sure the same applies for the website, which is www.microwarehouse.com. ; I have found lately that they had some terrific prices on memory.  Oh, and they ship quickly and accurately.

Michelle Fulton

I guess I should rephrase this question.  Which B2B/B2C websites does your company or employer make their purchases from?  I know most of us go to retail places for individual purchases, but for business purchases to buy 20 monitors or 15 UPS's where would those businesses go?

I'm asking b/c my office is lookign to purchase some office equipment and are exploring the B2B route, rather than straight retail.  

thanks,

mr

I would email several sites and get bids on the equipment you need. Microwarehouse has been an excellent vendor but I have sometimes ppurchased from other B2B. Cnet shopping can help with initial pricing as can pricewatch .com
Hope this helps

We are a reseller and actually have switched purchasing much of our components from the web.  We use www.us.buy.com, www.onvia.com, www.us-itek.com and others.  However, for pricing we ALWAYS start with shopper.cnet.com and key in the model of what ever we're looking for and it will respond with the best prices.  You can then link to any of the sites to purchase.

Most of the time these prices are lower than our distributors.

I know that's not supporting our local vendor, but, we don't have any and business IS business after all.