What questions to ask before purchasing from ANY Vendor

[GregNac19]

This is mainly for digital equipment.

Here is a few but please add your suggestions,

When Leasing; What is included and what are my terms
1. Is there any upfront fees; documentation, filing fees, security deposit?. If you have been around a few years and you should not need to pay any of these.
2. Will property taxes be included in you lease price? Most companies will include this if you ask.
3. Is insurance included in the lease? Some leasing companies will add insurance and you might not know it. You might be covered with your property insurance.
4. Will my rates for clicks go up every year? You can get these fixed, but sometime it will raise the click price.
5. What are my end of the lease options. (Recomendation Do not purchase a color machine to keep! at the end of a lease) The market has shown the clicks rates go down year after year. Plus how well will you color look after 5 years of a good volume?
5. End of lease termination- This one is tricky. Will my lease just renew for 1 month or for 1 year. There is nothing worse than be told you must make a decision now or you will owe your lease payment 12 more times.
6. Replacement guarantee; If I get a lemon will I be backed by the company that sold this to me? If so who decides. Do not get stuck in the, "let us try 90 things until you threaten to push the machine on the freeway". You need to be in control.
7. Know your tax breaks. In North Carolina you can get a 1% sales tax instead of paying 7%. What a savings!
Remember get it in writing

The best thing to do is ask your salesrep to who uses the machine and can I go see it.

Please add your experiences and anything else that might be helpful to everyone!

 

[rcreveli]

What is the purchase price? A lot of companies want to give you the lease price only. They will also hide behind things like government pricing to avoid giving an buyout price (I'm looking at you Oce')

 

[notech_commonsense]

transparency.... will you rep tear your lease apart for you to examine the inner workings?

 

[smatros]

I would add to require a CED (customer expectation document) where everything that may be expected from the machine is specified.

 

[PineyBob]

This is mainly for digital equipment.

Here is a few but please add your suggestions,

When Leasing; What is included and what are my terms
1. Is there any upfront fees; documentation, filing fees, security deposit?. If you have been around a few years and you should not need to pay any of these.
2. Will property taxes be included in you lease price? Most companies will include this if you ask.
3. Is insurance included in the lease? Some leasing companies will add insurance and you might not know it. You might be covered with your property insurance.
4. Will my rates for clicks go up every year? You can get these fixed, but sometime it will raise the click price.
5. What are my end of the lease options. (Recomendation Do not purchase a color machine to keep! at the end of a lease) The market has shown the clicks rates go down year after year. Plus how well will you color look after 5 years of a good volume?
5. End of lease termination- This one is tricky. Will my lease just renew for 1 month or for 1 year. There is nothing worse than be told you must make a decision now or you will owe your lease payment 12 more times.
6. Replacement guarantee; If I get a lemon will I be backed by the company that sold this to me? If so who decides. Do not get stuck in the, "let us try 90 things until you threaten to push the machine on the freeway". You need to be in control.
7. Know your tax breaks. In North Carolina you can get a 1% sales tax instead of paying 7%. What a savings!
Remember get it in writing

The best thing to do is ask your salesrep to who uses the machine and can I go see it.

Please add your experiences and anything else that might be helpful to everyone!

EXCELLENT POINTS!

One thing I did in helping a customer decide what to buy was to get my client to provide what I call a "Benchmark" file. One that was used for traditional offset and has printed samples at hand.

We then took this file and had it reproduced on the respective Demo units for comparison. We gave the respective dealers about a week to produce prints of the file along with the some of the stock used to print the piece.

Meanwhile back at the ranch we PAID to have the same thing done at local shops that had the products we were considering.

When it came time for the Demos EVERYBODY was given an equal chance to show exactly what their equipment could do and we were very open as to where our samples were printed and what our likes and dislikes were. No vendor could claim we were unfair.

The reason we gave the files to both the dealer and paid a vendor was to test the skills of the dealers color specialists since they would be supporting the client. I'm happy to report in this case that all of the support people were up to the task, as their samples were equal or better then the paid output.

We also showed the output to key customer of the client and in the end we did reach consensus and stack ranked the three finalists by quality.

In the end the choice was the Canon 700VP as the feeling was that it was more robust then the K-M6500 and less expensive then the Xerox 8000. We had ruled out Indigo and NexPress prior to the benchmark.

Once you go through all of this if you like then the list made by Greg are essential questions to get to the deal done. Canon won not by being the best quality, but by having the most attractive combination of quality, price and terms.

I think involving large key customers was a unique idea, one that I now suggest on a regular basis as it drove additional revenue for the client.