Taking on the big OEMs
Cassidy explained that C3's main areas of business have been components and PCs. "There's currently a huge rebellion against Dell in Ireland due to it moving its manufacturing from Limerick," he said. "That's led to growth for us - within the past six months PC sales have gone up by 20 percent."
So it looks like Dell's decision has been serendipitous for C3. A possible reason for the relative lack of independent technology e-tailers in Ireland historically could have been the strong presence of big OEMs like Dell. If sentiment is moving away from them and towards local SI's, then Cassidy seems to have been in the right place at the right time.
Accordingly, most of C3's custom comes from Ireland, and the majority of that Northern Ireland. But Cassidy is very keen to grow his market share in the UK mainland.
"We're currently pricing very aggressively against other UK e-tailers and there's now not much difference between our shipping costs and theirs," said Cassidy. "A speedy RMA procedure is also very important and we'll have a lot of new things coming in the next few months."
We asked which specific product categories are hot right now. "Graphics is a huge thing at the minute, but a difficult one," said Cassidy. "There's frustration among consumers that the upgrade from series to series isn't that high.
"On the CPU side, Core i5 could be a good product - the difference between the high-end Core i5 and the Core i7 920 is small."
