Lenovo who are already direct selling their PC’s in Australia, has opened an EBay store a move that has upset several of the B2B resellers, who claims that the online store is “under cutting” their margins.
Gillian Choo, the head of eCommerce at Lenovo Australia and New Zealand said “Launched last year, this, store within a store, is directly aligned with the Lenovo.com.au eCommerce experience, we are simply providing another option for purchasing Lenovo products online”.
A senior executive for a major Lenovo B2B partner said “It’s hard enough as it is, but to have the vendor whose product one is trying to sell also competing for the direct dollar makes it extremly difficult”.
“Vendors direct selling combined with the arrival of Amazon is going to make life very difficult for partners to the extent that we could very well be forced out of business”.
Earlier this week we revealed that Lenovo is set to open 100 of their own retail stores in the Asia Pacific region.
Brendan Lau the head of consumer sales for Lenovo Australia, has not denied that Lenovo Australia is planning to open their own retail stores which are set to be used to push the Chinese Companies new range of Legion Gaming PC’s and consumer notebooks.
A spokesperson for Lenovo Australia said when Lau was asked about the new stores said earlier in the week “Lenovo has nothing further to share at this time”
The new Lenovo Legion line of gaming laptops and PCs which are on sale at Harvey Norman and via the Companies direct sell web site, feature some of the most loaded PCs offered by Lenovo.
Legion is to Lenovo what Alienware is to Dell — a product family that will help Lenovo cash in on PC gaming and virtual reality.
Beyond PCs, the Legion includes gaming monitors and accessories.
At this stage, Lenovo isn’t known as a game PC maker similar to the Acer Predator or Dell’s Alienware.
Recently the Company partnered with Razer to build not only desktops, but keyboards with lighting effects and other gaming accessories.
Lenovo hopes Legion — a name coined after the large units in the armies of the Roman empire — will resonate with gamers in Australia.
