Flipping Gaming PCs?

Is it viable to build budget gaming rigs and flip them for a premium? The only part I am worried about is selling them reliably and consistently.

Go charge old people for tech support. Easier and less overhead.

People don't usually buy prebuilts from random anons.

You might have some luck looking for deals and parting it out but there's no telling.

that shit looks horrible

i hope you didn't build that

Lol nope, google image searched for budget gaming pc. Either way, for $250 bucks it's not gonna be pretty.

Don't do it, you'll find yourself supporting those machines whether you like it or not. People will find any excuse to call you about them. Aside from that you'll barely be able to turn a profit on them if you consider your own time worth any money at all

You are right there is 0 overhead but there are people that will pay extra for a "gaming" PC. Think about it, many people want a gaming PC but are too afraid to build one themselves, so they will pay extra for the convenience of it being done by someone else. Building a $300 PC and selling for even $400 or $450 is a great profit.

>go to recycling center
>get some easy to fix desktops or laptops
>invest the minimum amount of money to get them working
>sell
>literal profit

I did this in high school in 2009. (It was me and a friend)

We only sold 2 if I remember correctly but what we did was put something together with best value per dollar parts and then added about $200 on top of price.

Considering I was making 7.25 an hour at my job, it was nice, but it's really hard to find a market doing it that way unless you know a lot of rich folks

Margins on a $250 computer would be pretty bad probably

Charge for tech support, problem solved.

Margins in computer hardware trading are razor thin. Only worth it if you have something truly special to offer, like particularly silent PCs, and even that is covered by enough companies nowadays.

I've built several PCs for friends and relatives. People who want a certain computer but don't have the skill, nerve or time to build. I charge a small fee but since the builds are so simple it's basically free money.

What hourly wage do you end up with, including time taken to order, unpack, garbage disposal, etc...?

What about personal support stuff, installation for home theatre stuff, a buddy to play steam games with stuff

Honestly I can imagine making a post on Craigslist with less commercial jargon going over pretty well. Like hey, I know computers and I'll build you one, help you set it up and teach you how to take care of it (check temps and whatnot) and I won't sell you any bullshit software. If you have issues, I live in town and you can fix it with me so you can do it on your own if it ever happens again.

A rule of thumb in art is usually
Cost of supplies
Time you spent on the piece in hours at an hourly rate you feel is appropriate (I usually go minimum wage unless someone offers me more, but I dont sell pieces often anyways)

I imagine for PC building though, it'd be hard to justify 3-5 hours of actual work for ~70 dollars profit.

I never keep track of it to that extent. I'm not professional about it.

When I built my friend's computer it was a quick build done in under an hour and I got $80 for my troubles.

When I built my Dad's computer I had to get it operating with his drives which took twelve hours. For my trouble I was paid around $450.

So it varies.

If I were operating an actual business I'd be much more stringent about it. I do think there is potential for some nice scratch there because there's a perception that PC gaming is super expensive, so even with my fee factored in people think they're getting a bargain because it's cheaper than expected. And frankly half the reason I do it is because building computers is fun. YMMV.

i always browse craigslist computer section and apparently people make cash doing this because there are always "custom gaming rigs" for sale

i'd probably go there to buy one if I was into games, support local neckbeards etc assuming they weren't taxing more than a couple hundo for assembling it

Test the waters, op. Take a couple of high res shots of your current rig, post specs in discription and slap a price slightly above what you think is fair so you have room for someone to offer you $200 off to feel like theyre getting a deal and see what happens.
If you get real offers or flat out just people who want to buy at the listed price, you know theres at least some interest in the market for custom built pc's.
If you cant get a reasonable offer, you know there is no way youll ever make money off of it.

T. Someone who tried exactly this and was disappointed to find it wouldnt work where i live.

Premium isn't that high. Source: I've done 37 computers for clients. Gaming rigs.

I don't think you are going to be able to markup $250 worth of parts by $100, that's too high a percentage.

You need to get better deals on parts, build them in runs of 50 or so, you are going to get eaten up buying the parts one at a time, you need to be getting the volume discount on that end.

you could probably mark up a $500 computer made of wholesale priced parts for $600 without much problem on ebay

go look around ebay tons of people recondition old macs and resell them it's a huge business

wow every nigger on earth is doing this on ebay

just search for gaming computer