I hope avoiding Amazon fits this community rules?

I need a few bits to resurrect an old PC. My Amazon cart is $68 with shipping - we’re going to cancel Prime, but my wife is still working on downloading all her photos. Best I can do elsewhere is near double this PLUS shipping from 3 different suppliers and 2 of the suppliers are on eBay, which is also a US company.

I moved to Canada a few years ago from Australia where I had pccasegear, scorptec and others. It seems Canadians have become reliant on the US market and Amazon and we now have no competitive local retailers for this type of thing?

  • Nils
    5•23 hours ago

    Adding to what other people already said

    • For used stuff, https://www.kijiji.ca/
    • DDR3 and SSD are still available around. (But I find it difficult to get Timetec and Patriot cheap outside Amazon - might be worth checking pcpartpicker)
    • Old cables parts: check for small repair shops in your region, give them a call, they might have a box with cables.

    And compare the prices with AliExpress. Occasionally, I find better prices here in Canada, but for cables, screws, filters, sadly importing is way cheaper. I think people buy in bulk from China and sell for 4X~10x more online here.

    I don’t know if you have tools and spare parts, but power cables are easy to fix if you follow the pin order and cable requirements.

    Also, on FB market, or kijiji, post what you are looking for. People might have, but did not know there was interest.

    I’m not sure if it is because of where I am living now, but +25 years ago there would be a whole neighbourhood of no brand tech stores, it was effortless to find old tech or next-generation consoles.

    Canada is frail with local resellers, from the ones I had good experience with, Mike’s closed, Canada Computers had data leak and price gouging in the recent history. All my interactions with Memory Express were awful, online or in person. I should have stopped after 3 times, but someone always says “they are better now”, shame on me. I have yet to try vuugo, pc-canada and shoprbc…

    There are also some small niche stores, but they sell custom-made stuff, cables with different colours, or parachute chord sleeves. But then you will pay the price of your full cart on a single cable.