The television parts business is opening doors for a lot of people. One such example is ShopJimmy.com. One man decided to take it upon himself to buy broken HDTVs and break them down for parts. Once he breaks them down, he sells the parts to customers who may not be able to find these parts otherwise.
With only 120,000 parts, he isn’t the size of Discount Merchant, PartStore, MCM, or Sears PartsDirect but with the growth he’s seeing business can’t be bad.
Owner Jimmy Vosika, 29, a computer programmer-turned-entrepreneur, buys TVs by the truckload, usually new ones damaged in shipment, from freight or warranty companies.
Working parts from those sets — internal circuit boards, power supplies, even the flat screens themselves — are removed and put up for sale on ShopJimmy’s eBay-style online store (www.shopjimmy.com). Buyers typically are service technicians from repair shops around the country, with some hobbyists mixed in.
ShopJimmy has parts from thousands of TV models. Many are hard-to-find parts from older sets, which manufacturers usually don’t have to stock after a model is a year old, according to Vosika.
One of the really cool parts of what ShopJimmy is that he’s helping a lot of the smaller TV repair shops to increase their own profitability.
[Source: Star Tribune]
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