Blackpool Computers ·
Stocking a repair counter on the Fylde coast
What a phone and laptop repair counter in Blackpool, Lytham St Annes or Fleetwood should keep on the shelf, how much to hold and how delivery from Dundee works.
Stock for the jobs you see
A repair counter in Blackpool, Lytham St Annes, Fleetwood or anywhere else on the Fylde sees a mix of jobs: residents with ageing laptops, small businesses with a handful of office machines, and, in the busy months, visitors who arrive without the charger they meant to pack. The right stock depends on which of those you see most, and the only reliable way to know is to write it down.
Keep a simple log for a month: every job, the part it needed and whether you had it on the shelf. At the end you will know which chargers you were asked for and could not supply, which upgrades you sold, and which parts sat untouched. Order from that list rather than from a catalogue, and repeat the exercise each season.
SSD and memory upgrades
The most dependable sale on an older business laptop is a solid-state drive and more memory. A 2.5-inch SATA SSD fits almost any laptop with a hard-drive bay, and replacing a spinning drive is the single biggest speed improvement most customers will ever notice. Newer laptops use M.2 drives instead; check whether the slot takes NVMe or the older M.2 SATA type before fitting, because a drive of the wrong type can fit the slot and still not work.
For capacity, 256GB covers most office and browsing machines, and 512GB suits customers who keep photos or larger files. Memory follows the same pattern: 8GB of DDR4 laptop memory is the everyday upgrade, with 16GB for heavier users. Laptops take the short SODIMM modules and desktops the long DIMM ones, and DDR4 and DDR5 are notched differently, so a module only goes in the slot it was made for. Laptops from roughly 2022 onwards are the ones likely to need DDR5.
Which chargers to hold
A lost or failed charger is one of the most common walk-in requests a counter gets, and it is a sale you lose to the next shop if you cannot supply it today. Hold the connectors that cover most business laptops in circulation: Dell small pin and big round pin, HP blue pin, Lenovo yellow rectangle, and USB-C. At 65W those cover a large share of what comes through the door. Keep Toshiba, ASUS and Acer round pins in smaller numbers.
Our charger packs are 100 adapters each, with no mains cables in the box. Most laptop adapters take a clover-leaf mains lead, so stock UK clover power cables alongside them; a smaller number of adapters take a two-pin figure-of-eight lead, so check the inlet before you sell. The larger IEC kettle-type leads are for desktops, monitors and some printers rather than laptops.
HDMI and VGA cables
HDMI cables in 1m, 2m and 3m lengths cover monitors, televisions and most projectors. VGA still earns its place: plenty of offices, schools and community spaces run older projectors and monitors, and a customer who needs one usually needs it the same day.
A pack of 100 is more than a single counter sells quickly, but cables keep, take little space and can be sold online as well as over the counter. Split each pack between the shop and your online listings rather than letting it sit in a back room.
Laptops for the shop window
Buying a lot of refurbished business laptops and selling the units singly gives a counter something to sell besides repairs. Before you buy, read the lot's spreadsheet row by row: the grades tell you how many will need cosmetic work, the processor and memory columns tell you what price each unit can support, and the keyboard column matters more than people expect, because a UK customer wants a UK layout.
Budget for the extras at the same time. Most units ship without chargers, and an SSD or memory upgrade from the same order turns a slow unit into an easy sale. Test every unit when the lot arrives. Business buyers report anything dead on arrival within 7 days, so unpack and test in that window rather than when each unit is sold.
How delivery to the Fylde works
Every order is dispatched from our warehouse in Dundee and delivered to your door; there are no collections. Orders under £2,000 travel by insured Royal Mail Special Delivery or Parcelforce, tracked from dispatch. Orders of £2,000 and over come on our own delivery trucks, Monday to Friday between 9am and 5pm, so make sure someone is at the counter to receive a large delivery during working hours.
We deliver to every Fylde postcode, from FY1 in central Blackpool to FY8 in Lytham St Annes and FY7 in Fleetwood. Payment is by card at checkout through Stripe, your invoice is emailed straight away, and we do not offer credit terms, so plan orders around your own cash flow. The simplest habit is a reorder level for each fast-moving line: when the shelf drops to it, order, so the next pack arrives before the last one runs out.