Dabs starts to ship BT kit
Following acquisition last month e-tailer showcases 36 product lines from parent company
Dabs.com started to ship BT products last week, but has claimed the telco’s portfolio will never form a major part of its business.
CRN exclusively revealed BT’s purchase of e-tailer Dabs for about £30m last month (CRN, 2 May).
The integration of Dabs has gathered pace, with 36 BT product lines available on dabs.com.
Jonathan Wall, marketing director at Dabs, said: “BT products will only ever be a small part of the product portfolio of Dabs, which will continue focus on computing products.”
Wall added that Dabs is shipping BT’s Micro product range, a combined phone system and wireless router, and other BT phone systems.
“[Shipping BT products on Dabs] was never the main reason for the acquisition, it was for BT to acquire a customer base and add investment,” Wall said.
Paul Graham, managing director of rival e-tailer Excite IT, said he does not expect that Dabs offering BT’s products will have a huge impact on Dabs’s sales.
“The Dabs and the BT brand will work quite well together,” he said. “Dabs will have access to 750,000 extra people to ‘mail shoot’ from the BT database. That is where Dabs will start to make its extra money.”
Graham said that Dabs will benefit more from the acquisition, because BT has a far larger customer base for Dabs to cross-sell into.
>> Further reading:
BT acquires dabs.com in online SME offensive