GV - re: Sales tax, you are exactly right. An individual buyer may ignore the tax, but a corporation can not.
Many individuals feel that this is a fair tradeoff - they have to pay higher shipping charges for a direct product, and if they buy from a local retailer, they have NO shipping costs.
I went to dinner last week with one of my clients, who buys desktop and server machines from both DELL and CPQ, and he mentioned that when you compare purchase price between DELL and CPQ, DELL shipping charges are considerably higher - since in his case the CPQ box comes from a local distributor.
Looking at real landed costs versus "hardware" for a bunch of servers at a California company a few weeks ago, DELL was below CPQ and IBM for a 2U rackmount by a few percent when shipping was ignored, but were high by nearly 5% when shipping was included. Since the customer has to pay shipping to get the product, this is a real competitive issue.
One of the interesting side debates on this topic happened recently in the TPC council - as costs drop for many benchmark numbers, the cost of shipping becomes a factor in who gets the top marks for price/performance, and they were considering adding some average cost of shipment to the TPC cost basis, since real customers have to pay those costs. |
