How to deal with Dell's price changes online...

[sqlhotdog2005]

Our clients like to get quotes for Dell products, so we go online to the Dell website, configure a system, and save it to our cart. From there we can print out a detail list to send to our client with prices.

I did a quote like this last night... this morning, I went back into My Cart, and the price had gone up by about $750!

(There had been a rebate available the night before.)

How can we do business like this? I guess we could just tell our clients to IGNORE the rebate amount... but how credible does THAT sound?

Or... we could do a quote that DOESN'T have a rebate, and our client go online to configure the same system and THEN there's a big discount available... that doesn't look good either.

Our Dell sales rep says to email him our cart and he will generate a quote for us that is more stable. What if we just want to add something like a floppy drive? It seems very counter-productive to have to email him again, wait for a reply, and potentially be subject to price fluctuations...

Surely I'm not the only one with this frustration... or perhaps I'm missing something obvious: that PC prices are like gasoline prices... you pay the price avaialble when you put your money down? ("Prices subject to change without notice.") Pretty hard to generate a quote that way.

Last questions: Is there an alternative website where we can generate quotes (that stick at least for 30 days)... preferable for Dell hardware. How does HP do this?

 

[LawnBoy]

Make your sales rep generate those quotes. In my experience if a quote is human-generated Dell will stick to it for 30 days. Yeah it's more hassle, but it does get you a stable quote.

 

[jkupski]

Make your sales rep generate those quotes. In my experience if a quote is human-generated Dell will stick to it for 30 days. Yeah it's more hassle, but it does get you a stable quote.

I ALWAYS get my rep to generate quotes for me. The prices are invariably lower, and if they miss a promo, they will always fix it when asked. They have also, in my experience, honored those quotes for FAR more than 30 days (in one particular case, I ordered something successfully based on an eight month old quote.)

When I've come across some deals that were too good to be true, while not having the budget to buy them at present, I've still gotten my rep to quote them for me so I could capture that pricing in the event a project came up in the near future.

 

[AndrewTait]

Also ask your Dell rep to quote for additional extras such as the floppy disk drive, more memory, more disk space. Then you will get a number of quotes which will be valid for longer.

Again, my experience is that they will go out of their way to get your business, and honour qoutes months after the 30 days have expired.

Had one occation last year where we got a quote for 50 17"TFT monitors. Evntually got the price down to something affordable, and had the quote homoured 2 months later, and a load of freebies thrown in as well! (Mainly printers!)

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So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains
And we never even know we have the key

Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum
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[NickFerrar]

Yeah I generate a basket online then email our account manager the details and he does a quote based off that. Typically we get 15-30% discount on web prices for servers.

It can be a hassle if I need to change the spec a few times and despite having the basket to work from I often get mistakes coming through so need to triple check everything.

As for freebies, best thing is to get the quote as you want it then ask for a couple of small extras for free, usually works especially if they're near quarter-end and short on targets. If I'm ordering 3+ servers I'll usually ask for an additional server free (only around $1500-2000 value though), nice way to build up a test lab without a budget

 

[stussy]

Heh sounds like we all have our sales people nicely controlled!

Another good freebie can be PDA's - I've often stuck a cheeky 'any axims going spare?' on the final order email (AFTER getting the price down to what we need), and more often than not they will do.

 

[stussy]

Sorry I didn't actually add anything about quotes there. I do the same as Nick - generate basket, email to acc manager and say 'what can you do?'. Never had any real grief, as I try and add everything I MIGHT need at the start.