Suppliers

Finding a good supplier of IT accessories and consumables for a small business is tricky. High Street retailers charge more than online vendors, which is fair enough as they do have higher overheads, but you'll probably find it worthwhile for the convenience of prodding the item and taking it away with you. More seriously though, their ethics vary wildly. The best known chain has an appalling record for making it is hard as possible to return faulty items combined with a staff of barely skilled callow youth motivated to push whatever head office decrees is this weeks target. They've chosen a business model that compensates for poor service with a huge marketing spend.

The big online sellers that pay to appear on price comparison sites are little better, I've found. When something goes wrong though, sorting it out is no fun. You'll typically spend time on hold and wind up questioning if it was ever worth bothering – which is fine by them. Just as important as their quality of service is that of their couriers', I've been let down by most of them more often than I've switched channel to avoid Emmerdale. It's not hard to see why the companies still make money: the web encourages decisions to buy on cost rather than service, buyers' ratings can't be trusted and there's little else to go on.

There's Amazon of course, low delivery charges, an easy going return policy, and user reviews that provide some useful information, for at least some of the time. You'll have to Google for their otherwise almost secret customer service phone number (at the time of writing, the UK one is 020 8636 9200. Now that's customer service), they only carry the more mainstream products and certainly do not offer any technical pre-sales expertise.

So where can you go? I've been providing a lot of kit to a lot of clients for years, and getting it right is mission critical. After much frustrating shopping around I found a company I can recommend: misco.co.uk. Because I don't sell goods (I prefer to remain staunchly independent) they are prepared to treat all my customers as one large company, they get a discount and staggeringly good personal service from a 'Premier account Manager'. I recently needed a hard to find chipset fan, and emailed him a photo and the motherboard details – he tracked down the £9.40 part, even though it wasn't available via Misco. Their standard service is fine too, and just as importantly their courier is efficient, always turning up next day. Top tip, always go for "one to three day" delivery, in London it always arrives next day.

The only exception is memory, I buy direct from Crucial -www.crucial.com/uk it offers fair prices and a fabulously useful web applet that analyses the PC to find the right product. It sometimes says it can't tell what memory you need, but its never made a wrong recommendation to me.

Finding good suppliers shouldn't be as hard as it is, but even in today's consumer society it still takes one heck of a lot of effort to consume without hassle. The internet's great but it sure hasn't fixed the customer service nightmare – and while consumers prefer laziness over efficiency, it won't get any better.