Editor's Note: Below is a continuation of an article that is publicly available on APDSP.org. To view that article, click here.
What Do Repro Shop Owners Say about DEX Imaging?
We asked a reprographic shop owner who competes against DEX Imaging about the nature of that competition. Here is what they said:
The one thing they have is larger corporate support and the sales and marketing that comes with it. The biggest disadvantage we have had over the past recent years is they get better pricing because they can combine locations and order larger amounts to get better price agreements.
In some cases, when a customer talks to companies who are small and large format dealers like DEX or HBM about the large format and ask how many “techs” they have, it is often appears they have more people trained on the plotters when they don’t actually have. We had a competitor in our area that had trained techs from another tech and not “school” trained and they were not that knowledgeable. This would be the one competitive strength a company could use to show they were better equipped.
There is no loyalty in this business any more from manufacturers. Even with customers, it’s not often about how well they have been taken care of or how knowledgeable our people are, when they decide to buy, they buy from the lowest bidder, once they know what they should be looking for. There were so many times when [we] would do the research and help the customer understand what they needed and answer all their questions (which competitors could not) and in the end [we] would lose the deal to a competitor because they sold under what we could buy for. They had better purchasing prices.