I was not too happy with a review that a competitor recently made about us, here are the facts.
A person came into a shop and decided that the existing system needed upgrading.
Although they were not upset with their existing system, they did have two problems with it that were particularly worrying to them. The first was that the labels were not showing the correct quantities, so they could not use the labels to count their stock, which meant a lot of work for them. The other problem was that cheque payments were incorrect on the end of day report which meant sometimes they had to scribble remarks on these reports. As they were scribbled on, they could not use the computer data for storage of the end of day reports but had to have a box to store them. Actually, this last point was something that infuriated them as they wanted to use the computer to store end of days, not have to use a box. As these problems had been there for ages with the old owner and had never been fixed, this annoyed them too.
However, their computer and software were old and both needed upgrading. So they invited a few submissions, including from us to see about an upgrade. During the submission, they made it quite clear they had only a small budget, and as they were only new in the shop, they doubted they could get a lease which they did not want anyway as they did not want to take on more debt.
Now lucky for us, what we have a few computers that have been sitting in our store room for a few years. They are NOT second hand. Clearly though we wanted to get rid of them, so we offered one of them to them at a super price. Although its old, as it NEW they come with a supplier's a return to base manufacturer’s warranty. As well we are so confident on their quality, that we offered them from us a 12 month on-site warranty. They have a Intel quad core 2.70 GHz processor, 8GB RAM and a 1TB SATA HDD which is more reasonable today. Not surprising as they were a top of the line computer a few years ago.
After reviewing all the submissions, they decided to switch to us for various reasons which I will not go into here.
So while replacing their existing system, we took the new computer, and as it was the best computer in the shop and made it a server. We upgraded it to windows 10 computer. Put a lot of software on it, including open office which our software works with, which is probably why our competitor thought it was second hand which it was not.
They are now very happy about their decision to come to us.
A good solution does not need to be expensive.
