Announcing Puget Labs

Last December, we got together at Puget Systems and talked about our industry, how we see computers evolving, and how Puget Systems can continue to grow as a leader in our industry. We mapped out an exciting long term plan, with some ambitious goals for 2011. I am happy to announce today one piece of that plan — Puget Labs. What is that all about?

Puget Systems Featured by Seattle Chamber of Commerce

Over the last few years, Puget Systems has made a strong effort to get more involved with our local business community. Keeping with this theme, we’re proud to announce our participation in the 2010 Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce Trade Show. We are both a sponsor of the event and a exhibitor. For those of you in the Seattle area, we encourage you to stop by the show and say hello. The show is May 12th and we’re in booth number 225. Hope to see you there!

As a promotion for the show, the Chamber stopped by and made a quick video highlighting Puget. Enjoy!

Features are not always selling points

We all seem to like our products with lots of features, especially when it comes to computers. After all, the personal computer is supposed to be the most versatile piece of electronics that you own, right? How can it be versatile without a long list of features? When it comes down to deciding what product to buy, one of the first things we do is put the features side by side, and see which gives us more capabilities for the dollar. What are we missing?

How accurate is ResellerRatings.com?

The website ResellerRatings.com has been around for a very long time, and is the de facto standard for checking out just about any online retailer in the industry. It provides a place for unbiased reviews of companies by people who have purchased in the past. However, in the last few years it has become increasingly easy to get a 9/10 score or better. Can the scores still be trusted, or has ResellerRatings.com become nothing more than a marketing platform? If so, how is that possible if the reviews cannot be affected by the companies being reviewed?

How SEO Built Our Business

This isn’t a normal thing for me to blog about, but I’ve had the desire recently to share more about Puget Systems behind the scenes: what makes us tick, what we value, and how we do things. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is something that we have been particularly strong at. I want to talk about the misconceptions about SEO that are out there, talk about why we are strong at it, and why I’m not worried about sharing these secrets to our competition!

Are 3 Year Warranties All They’re Cracked Up To Be?

We recently ran a special on all our systems, offering a free upgrade to a three year warranty. To be honest, in the current economy, I did not expect it to be terribly successful — I thought that (at this time) price was the biggest factor, and that monetary discounts might yield better results. I was wrong! The free warranty upgrades were wildly popular, and we showed a 300% boost in sales during that time. Why do you think that is? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below!

The Secret to Marketing with Social Media

Social media has exploded in popularity over the last few years. MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon — each have a huge user base, and there are hundreds of other sites just like them. With that many people collected together, anyone in advertising or marketing knows that social media is the bright new frontier for promoting their company and products. I’ve been approached by several marketing firms saying they hold the key to successful marketing in this space, but I’ve turned them all away. Why? Because I already know the secret!

Customer Service that Serves Customers

My job title at Puget is ‘Director of Inventory’, which is a fancy way of saying that I’m responsible for keeping track of any parts that aren’t currently inside a computer. Among other duties, I have the delightful job of arranging Return Merchandise Authorizations (RMAs) with our suppliers – just as our customers come to us for warranty support, we can go to our suppliers or the manufacturer to get defective parts replaced. It’s rewarding to see a stream of broken parts go out the door and come back in a couple weeks as shiny, functional equipment, but trying to get warranty support can also be one of the greatest hassles known to man.

Puget Systems Blog!

Everyone and their mother has a blog today, and we have been cautious about whether it is really a good addition to our company. I’m happy to report that we have enthusiastically decided it is! This blog will be a place where all Puget Systems staff can post their thoughts and stories, in a venue that we don’t really have otherwise. It will be more formal than our forum posts, but not so complex as hardware articles. We’ve often commented to ourselves that we have good information that the public needs to know! Sometimes writing a full hardware article requires a level of research, data gathering, and formatting that is too daunting to make it worth while for more of your everyday thoughts. This will give us that happy medium! There are quite a few people here enthusiastic about getting started, and I look forward to seeing this in action.