Starting June 10, Wal-Mart will start selling two exclusive Dell Dimension PC builds, both priced at under $700, at its 3,500 Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores in the US, Canada and Puerto Rico.
The companies did not break out the specs of the two models. On Dell.com, $700 would buy you a Vista Home Premium PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo at 1.8GHz processor, 1GB of memory and a 250GB hard disk.
The move did not come as a terrible surprise. Dell has been dropping hints that an indirect channel play was on the cards ever since Michael Dell returned to the CEO’s office at the company in January.
The Direct Model has been a revolution, but is not a religion, Michael Dell said in an internal email that was leaked last month. We will continue to improve our business model, and go beyond it, to give our customers what they need.
While not surprising, the move is still unprecedented. The PC maker has been synonymous with the direct-to-buyer sales model for its entire history, and its company mission statement makes plentiful references to the benefits of direct sales over retail.
The company is based on a simple concept: by selling computer systems directly to customers, Dell could best understand their needs and efficiently provide the most effective computing solutions to meet those needs, the company says on its web site.
This direct business model eliminates retailers that add unnecessary time and cost, or can diminish Dell’s understanding of customer expectations, it reads. Dell also introduces the latest relevant technology much more quickly than companies with slow-moving, indirect distribution channels.
These core values of flexibility would not appear to have been completely abandoned with the announcement of the Wal-Mart retail deal, however, judging from a joint statement.
Both companies will evaluate the success of these products and launch, and make changes accordingly in distribution or product based on consumer feedback and purchase response, already anticipated to be high, the companies said in a statement yesterday.
The Wal-Mart deal comes as part of Dell’s attempts to reverse the fortunes of the last year, in which it lost its market-share leadership to HP and became embroiled in an accounting scandal.
