VARs are wary of the uncertainty and chaos in financial markets and its potential to filter down to their businesses as well, but they haven’t seen that happen. Yet.
That’s the message they sent to their distributor at D&H Distributing’s conference in Pennsylvania this week, according to Dan Schwab, co-president of the Harrisburg, Pa.-based SMB specialty distributor.
"They were concerned and cautious but none of them had seen their businesses take a dramatic downturn nor were they looking to make drastic changes to their businesses," Schwab told Channel Insider. "As of two weeks ago I believe that most of the small business community was pretty much immune to what was going on. It just had not bubbled down as much to small business and consumers. In last week or two it’s starting to have some effect. It’s created concern."
With a goal of countering some of those concerns, D&H announced plans to further increase the amount of credit available to its resellers. The company first increased credit available by $10 million in March. This week D&H increased the credit available by another $15 million.
Credit lines will be automatically increased or initiated depending upon D&H’s internal mechanisms and based on the VARs’ histories and relationship with the distributor.
"We are still somewhat of a conservative company in terms of making investments," Schwab said. "We are really doing this on a case-by-case basis." Schwab added that several resellers approached him during the D&H event this week to inquire about the credit increases.
In addition, Schwab said D&H has renegotiated its freight contracts with shipping companies to avoid changing its terms with resellers for shipping. That means D&H will forgo any increase in the free freight thresholds and added fees. "The fees and thresholds have stayed the same for a number of years now," he said.
Separately at the D&H event this week, the distributor announced that it has created a group of vendor specialists covering technologies from Cisco, Intel, HP and Lenovo.
D&H also announced its progress on its emerging technologies program.
"We’ve added about 40 vendors in the last four to four and a half months," Schwab said. "These vendors offer new and innovative solutions that allow our resellers to add more margin to their solutions." Schwab said, for example, by layering in these other technologies, resellers could double the margin of a notebook sale.