It is not easy at all surviving in the Amiga market. It is a very small marketplace and we are very fortunate that we have some very loyal customers who keep us going through good times and bad, of which we are immensely grateful for their support.
We run this business with dedicated full time staff and we do not do anything else except the Amiga business, so we are reliant on the revenue to pay our for our offices, staff and overheads. Any profit we make gets re-invested to make new Amiga products so that we have something new to sell in future years.
During the last year or two, it has become a lot tougher to stay profitable due to increased competition in the tiny Amiga market- there are a lot of part time new Amiga "dealers" that have started selling similar products to us. We respond by developing new Amiga software and add-ons, peripheral hardware that will hopefully distinguish us from people who do this in their spare time for some extra cash. We have found over the last 10 years that there have been lots of dealers start-up, sell the more profitable products, then fold. Our inventory is mixed, containing products with reasonable margin and many with minimal margin. However, we recognised that it is better to stock both types of product to deliver a wider range and service to the Amiga community.
The biggest benefit of working in this community is that it is our passion outside of work too and it is thrilling to see new exciting products delivered and made available for Classic Amigas such as the A1200.
@ral-clan
Well, now that we have the web, stores don't need an actual location or even maintain a lot of stock (they can just serve as go-betweens)
We have a real office unit with a walk-in customer counter with almost a 4000 square foot area. Local business taxes for the building are very high for this commercial space as you can imagine. We have dedicated service area with benches where we repair Amiga's and a warehouse where we stock pile Amiga parts.
We generally have to buy 3 years of stock of main product lines because it makes sense to manufacture in a larger quantity to keep prices for customers down. It is not generally possible to operate Just In Time stock control in the Amiga market as we are dealing with obsolete hardware. This all results in capital being tied up for many years before it is sold to customers.
