The Price you Pay for Cheap Products
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009With the current economy the way it is, there is increasing pressure on businesses to cut costs at every opportunity and find better deals and bargains on required products. However, businesses should be aware that if they buy too cheaply, they run the risk of products failing and their reputation being at stake and will therefore be forced to spend more money in the long run. In my experience this has become more apparent with USB sticks than any other media storage device.
In recent months, I have seen an increasing number of USB production jobs where the customer has supplied us with their own USB media to copy on to. Although happy to duplicate onto pre-sourced USBs, there have been several jobs now where the supplied USBs were, shall we say, not of the greatest quality.
To give you a better idea of the effect this can have, one customer required us to upload company data onto 500 of their supplied USBs so that they could hand them out at an exhibition to promote brand awareness. During the duplication process, we found that 28% of the sticks had failed to upload (140 units total). Despite trying the sticks again they still would not duplicate as the chip inside them was of such poor quality.
As a result, the customer did not have enough USBs to hand out at the event and of those sticks that were handed out, they could no longer be confident that they would all work when these potential clients tried to use them.
So, as a lesson, businesses looking for bargains may indeed find products which are much cheaper than others on the market and they may think they are getting a great deal, however they could also be taking a huge gamble. For instance, if you make a 30% saving on the USBs and 28% of them fail and cannot be used, you haven’t saved any money. The cost cutting risk is apparent; you risk losing any possible saving you could have made and risk your reputation by handing out a branded product that just doesn’t work.
With reputation and word of mouth so vital in today’s world, paying out a little extra for good quality products from a reliable supplier will give you that vital peace of mind.
CD Team Account Manager