Jeff Chausse
Digital Strategy + Design
HP Has No Idea What It Can Sell You
I clicked on a banner ad regarding the HP xw8400 Workstation. It sent me to a cutesy Flash promo, which then sent me here:
If you click “Buying Options”, it tells you “This product is not available for purchase from HP’s online store”.
Well, that sucks. So I went to Google to find out who WILL sell it to me. A bit of searching led me to this page – a page in HP’s store. Where you CAN buy it.
Then I did a seach for the workstation via HP.com’s own search engine and came to this page, where I’m told the system will be available in 30 days.
Right hand, meet left hand, meet… middle hand?
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HP’s website is horrible, I have to deal with it on a daily basis since I work for an HP reseller.
On the workstation class PCs, HP wants you to purchase them thru the reseller program, instead of straight thru HP.
It is purchaseable thru the website, and even the first page you linked to does have a version that is for public sale thru the website, you just have to click on the link up top labeled ‘xw8400 Workstation’ and that takes you to the upper level, where you can select a version that is publically purchaseable.
The way HP arranges their equipment is by multiple part numbers for the same product, just with different configurations. Some configs are for sale thru resellers only, and that is what you are running into. You are selecting a specific model of the xw8400 that is reseller only, but if you bring up the general list of them you are able to select one for purchase.
Since it is such a high end box, alot of the xw series, especially the highest end like xw8400, are put into enterprise class products, thus require a reseller.
As for the one that says it is available in 30 days, it appears like that is a defunct page that somehow didn’t get purged from the database when they released the xw8400. On a site as large and complex as HP, I don’t find that surprising at all, even though it causes many people problems while researching products.