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Comment by antonovka | Hacker News Reader

I love up-front non-predatory pricing. I hate wasting my time with salespeople, though sometimes you can work out a better deal with them.

My preferred vendor is Silicon Mechanics: http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

They sell SuperMicro equipment, they list prices, estimated power draw, etc, all up-front. You can add machines to your shopping cart, checkout, and you're done.

They've always provided us with fantastic customer service, and stepped up to replace/repair anything that didn't work right, even if the cause wasn't entirely clear (such as a hard drive issue that could have been OS related, but turned out to be a Seagate firmware issue).

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Dell does provide prices on their website. You can pull out your credit card and buy a server without talking to anyone. The purpose of a quote is to negotiate a better price.

The purpose of a quote is to negotiate a better price.

I know, which is why I said exactly that in my post =)

That said, I prefer vendors that simply charge everyone the same reasonable price, rather than having such a large profit margin that they can afford to:

1) Pay a sales team to finagle over quotes.

2) Slash their prices on demand.

Obviously, things are a bit different when you're buying in truly massive quantities.

Dell's process has always had that "car salesman" feel... I can get you a better price - Let me talk to my boss.

That's what used to be great about Dell, you could price every option you wanted on the website. Then if you had missed a deal or wanted a discount on shipping there was a very nice business customer team in Dublin you could call.

Then Dell gave us a sales manager and all sales had to go through him - to be fair he would often return our calls within a week or t least send an email saying he would call. And quotes through him were generally only 10-20% more than the website price once you had removed all the Server CALS and Office licenses that got added to every machine you asked for.

But of course he wouldn't sell you Latitude or whatever they were calling their low end machines because you were now a medium size customer. In the end we resorted to buying anything for the dev team from the outlet on credit card.

Getting a better deal and spending less time are the two main reasons I go through a rep.

We needed to purchase some blades a year or so ago, and they initially quoted us 45k (which seemed to be well under their website's price). Since we were comparison shopping, we let them know IBM's quote, and after some intense back and forth we got the price down to around 37k (and with some ADDITIONAL components not in the original quote)... a significant savings.

Along those same lines, if we need a new laptop or desktop, the refurbs are usually well-priced, but if speed is important we just shoot them a list of specs and get a quote quickly (instead of spending time on the website comparing optiplexes vs. latitudes, or whatever the different models are.)

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