Thinking about getting into PC Building - help.

[Samuel V]

In the UK at least, prebuilt PCs are HUGE. Looking on eBay, people make £100 profit on a build and sell about 3 a day. Now, I'm not looking for huge profits but I want the experience of building a PC by hand and often. I've already built many PCs for myself, friends and family and have been into building PCs for the past 4 years now, so I know my stuff.

So, I have a few modestly spec'ed PCPartPicker lists ranging from £400-£800 with only around £30 added on top for the builds. Do you think this could be a successful business if I tried enough? The space is very competitive, but I think customer care and attention to detail from my builds could put a little heavier price tag?

I obviously own a Windows Shop, so that also covers some costs down.

So, what do you think the viability of this is?
Sam.

 

[Katana]

n o

 

[Samuel V]

n o

w h y

 

[hgbf]

You can probably make some money doing this, yes. Start small and see if there's any demand, and then let it continue from there.

 

[Kuo]

If you want to do this. Start by buying a cheap Office desktop. Most have a i5 and like 4-8GB of ddr3, then buy a cheap graphics card (I would say a rx 560 would be good) and just buy a cheap case with a set of RGB fans. People love that shit. All of that should cost around 200-250, then sell it for 350 or 400.

 

[solo]

I'd sell them for at-least $100 profit if the build is $300+

 

[MyNameIsAres]

Coming from someone who was in the industry, it's an incredibly competitive market and difficult to do full-time if you're by yourself. To my knowledge, the UK already has some reputable companies that build custom (gaming) computers.

These reputable companies have a number of employees and often have well-organized stations. Employees/stations for customer service, installing software and optimizing (we called it "Plug and Play"), and of course actually assembling the computer.

It's a lot that goes into a company like that. Obviously you can start small and local, but branching out is a long-term process. If you had friends to help out, that'd definitely help.

Consider applying for a job (or internship) to one of these companies, to get experience and see if it's something you would actually enjoy doing. That's my two cents on the matter.