In the world of new computer parts, the person who sells them the cheapest is either the person with the lowest over heads such as a teen still living at home or the big businesses who can buy them in bulk.
For every other business it comes down to the person who takes the smallest piece out of the pie, because their suppliers are all usually the same people,but it is a tough game to be in. Second hand and older parts however, can be quite lucrative at times if you have the right parts and the right buyers.
For example, I have an old twelve inch Dell laptop and because of its small size, it carries its floppy and CDRom drive externally via a small cable. Should this cable become damaged, it would cost at least one hundred dollars to get it replaced, because they are very hard to obtain since they break so easily and no more of this type are being made.
Another example is if an old computer has a hard drive failure but upgrading is not a viable option, then you will not be able to go down to the local supplier and put a three hundred twenty gig hard drive in it simply because the old computer simply will not support it. The computer will need a hard drive, which is similar size to the one it had in it.
A second hand forty gig hard drive from a store typically sells for around forty dollars and a new three hundred twenty gig new hard drive retails for about one hundred twenty dollars. Guess which one has the bigger markup on it? The forty gig hard drive, which can be obtained for around ten dollars is you know where to look.
Chances are that there are computer auctions in your city where liquidated business or ex-government computers are being sold for dirt cheap. To find them, use Google and search for computer auctions your city name. Typically you go to the auction location the day before to inspect the hardware where you can make notes about each item number and the next day go bid for them. At a computer auction you can expect to see many ex-government clone computers, old servers, boxes of mixed hardware, old, but never used hardware, and lots of software which may not even be that old.
It is quite possible to pick up five working one ghz computers with two hundred fifty six ram and forty gig hard drives for thirty dollars each. If you strip them down and sell their parts individually such as the hard drive for forty dollars, then you have already made back your money on one computer and you still have the RAM, CPU, optical drives and mother board to sell.
From my own experience with auctions there is one big tip I can give you. Go and inspect the hardware the day before to check if they all work, if they are what they are labeled and write down the maximum you are willing to pay for that hardware, because it is easy to go above what they are worth if a bidding war occurs.
Speaking of the labels on computer hardware at auctions, a fellow blogger spotted some 1ghz Xeon servers labeled as normal Pentium 3 desktops at an auction. He brought all of them for five thousand dollars and had made a total twenty five thousand after expenses by selling them on eBay. EBay is generally more expensive, because of bidding wars with other people like yourselves buying with the intention to resell.
However, it is common to find some real gems that others totally missed, especially with specific parts for specific models of computers. A tip I recommend for buying computer parts on eBay is to snipe. Sniping is the process of waiting until the very last minute before the auction ends to place the highest bid, this way you prevent a bidding war against others which can save you a lot of money in the end. EBay can also be used in conjunction with bricks and mortar computer auctions like in the blogger link I posted above by buying cheap at actions and selling for more on eBay.
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