IT Accessorie Bring In The $$$
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Computer accessories represent straight forward sells which brings in the money for resellers and keeps the customer complaints away.

Computer hardware has seen resurgence of interest due to the broadband push. However resellers are still finding a hard time bringing in the profit because of the stockpile of cheap products in the marketplace. While they aren’t making much money from hardware products, resellers are seeing the dollars come in from the growing interest in IT accessories.

Australia company Anyware is a niche player and national distributor of IT accessories, although it’s in the computer industry, it doesn’t don’t sell hard drives or CPUs. According to Garrison Huang, the company basically avoids major components, but all the other peripheral accessories i.e. Plantronic headphones, Mystic desktop cases, Pegasus’ Digital Pen, just to name a few for the past eight years.

“Computer accessories are a growing business; we haven’t seen any decline because the peripheral market has a lot more potential than components business. Computers are more widely available and the recent growth in hardware sales is being fuelled by broadband. As people buy computers they also want try to see what they can do with their products,” said Huang.

Although the company has signed a deal with Capital Security Solutions (which represents Norwegian based anti-virus, Norman), Huang feels this isn’t a huge deal for Anyware.

“It signifies one thing and that’s our interest in tapping into the anti-virus market. I believe this is a growing market and represents a strong opportunity for us. However I think distributing products like Pegasus’ Pegasus’ Mobile NoteTaker or PC Notes is much more interesting because it’s a unique product and sales have been quite strong. The market is appealing because you won’t need a computer to write with the product and then convert it into digital text in nine different languages,” he said. “We are not trying to be a mainstream player. We basically don’t have strong components, we do sell modems but it’s not the business for us,

Huang feels Anyware’s wide range of products has many benefits as resellers will be able to get better margins as the products are less-price sensitive and won’t go down in value, like hardware.

“Where we stand on the market space, I believe accessories represent better value on reselling. I can give you an example, resellers selling printers can make 5-10 dollars on single printer sale. However with one USB cable they can make 5-10 dollars easily. A reseller can make 25-30 per cent margin on our i-Rocks nxt MP3 Audio case product; however is a normal situation a reseller could never make this kind of margin on an MP3 player. Accessories are easy sell products, which means resellers won’t have to deal with customers once the product is sold. Resellers will rarely get a complaint about an accessory sold,” said Huang.

Anyware now distributes a range of LCD monitor mounts and Digital TV products.

“We don’t have the TV itself we don’t even sell set-top-boxes but we have digital tuner cards for PCs, which allows PCs to receive TV programs. We will shortly release USB key size digital TV tuners shortly co consumers can receive digital TV. Again it’s a niche product and they have a certain appeal to customers, said Huang. “We are releasing products very quickly for distribution and we’ve recently signed up with Klipsch a US speaker system manufacturer which has a strong presence in the home theatre market in US.”