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Lenovo opens UK online shop
CHINESE PC FIRM Lenovo has opened an online shop in the UK, aimed at very small businesses (VSBs), home offices and consumers who want to buy direct. We're not sure how small you have to be to be very small, but most are heading that way in the current climate, it seems.
Customers can configure custom PCs directly from the computer maker, which it says will be delivered within 10 working days. Lenovo said it will continue to sell to bigger businesses through its Lenovo Business Partners programme and through indirect channels.
The site offers a complete range of Thinkpads, PCs, netbooks and accessories.
"The new Lenovo web shop expands our horizons beyond our traditional small to medium sized business (SMB) base into home offices, VSBs and consumers," flannelled Alan Munro, vice president of Lenovo in the UK and Ireland.
"This strategic new direction complements our existing indirect sales through our channel business partners."
Analyst firm IDC reckons 16 per cent of UK PC sales to homes and small offices/home offices are direct sales.
Munro claimed that the move does not mean that Lenovo is abandoning its indirect route to market, just cutting out a few middlemen.
"Our channel business remains strategically important to us, particularly in enabling us to satisfy demand from customers in the SMB market, and we will continue to drive demand for both direct and indirect routes to market through various web and marketing programmes," he said. µ
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Here's a link to the Lenovo UK web site which has a banner re: the new Web shop. I had a browse through the Txxx and Wxxx options and it looks like the customisation is around the Warranty options and accessories. It's not really clear what's included in the base model but perhaps a bit more digging might display that. It's early days I suppose but a full list of customisations, like the US site, would be appreciated! In fact I'm still tempted to buy from the US but the Int. Warranty on the CTO (Configure To Order) models continues to be an issue.
http://www.lenovo.com/uk/en/
George
The link still doesn't work; it's now a low-level 404 message, rather than the previous custom 404 page. Does anyone know if the opening of a Lenovo shop in the UK is true?!?
As far as I know, Insight doesn't let you customize your configuration.
Is this UK only? Btw. they changed it today to something not interesting.
Last time I looked, the Lenovo shop never worked and has a big "Powered by Insight" banner on it.
Thus I give you the page I used to buy my Thinkpad R61e: http://uk.insight.com/apps/brands/mfg.php?mfgcode=LEN
This is great news :) Customers in Europe hadn't been able to customize their configurations before.
But the link to the shop, http://shop.lenovo.co.uk/content/homepage/lenovo currently says "The page you requested cannot be displayed". Hope it's just temporary outage.