Dabs.com

» see dabs.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Dabs started in 1987 as Dabs Press, a small computer-book publisher run by David Atherton and Bruce Smith out of Bolton. The name was their two sets of initials. Publishing turned into mail order within a few years, and the reseller that advertised in the back pages of British IT magazines went online as dabs.com in the nineties.

The peak was the middle of the 2000s. Dabs was one of the largest online sellers of computer parts in Britain, moving around 5,000 transactions a day and turning over roughly 200 million pounds a year by 2008, with more than 200 staff. It was where a British person building a PC went for a motherboard, and it had the reputation that comes from getting next-day delivery right often enough.

BT bought it in April 2006 for about 30 million pounds and ran it as a wholly owned subsidiary. For ten years the brand stayed on the site while the parent worked out what it actually wanted from owning a component retailer. The answer arrived in March 2016.

On 23 March BT announced it was retiring the dabs name and folding the business into BT Shop for consumers and BT Business Direct for trade. Customers were asked to register again on the new site, because the accounts did not carry over. The brand was gone by 11 April 2016, twenty-nine years after two men started a book imprint with their initials on it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the box was ~

What Dabs sold was the unglamorous middle of the industry. Hard drives and graphics cards, cases and power supplies. These are the parts you order because a machine at home is one component short of working. There was no theater to it and no store to walk into, just a catalog that happened to be a website and a courier van the next morning.

None of that reached me, and the reason is duller than a border. A parts retailer is a warehouse and a courier contract, both of which stop at a national line. In Turkey through the same years you did not order a hard disk, you went and got one. The component trade here was a building you walked into, a floor of small units where comparing prices meant walking twenty meters, and the part came home in a bag on your lap.

~ the brand execution ~

The way it ended annoyed people more than the fact of it. BT did not migrate the accounts. Anyone who had bought from Dabs for a decade was told to create a fresh login on BT Shop, with the order history and saved addresses left behind. The Register ran the announcement in March under a headline that was mostly the question everyone was asking, and the comment thread under it was long.

BT's logic was ordinary enough. It had bought a consumer brand it never managed to make part of BT, and by 2016 it wanted one shop front instead of two. The price of that tidiness was a name British enthusiasts had been typing into a browser for fifteen years.

~ where the customers went ~

BT later folded its consumer retail into EE, and today dabs.com hands you to store.ee.co.uk. The link arrives carrying a tracking tag that reads utm_source=dabs+migration, still sorting the traffic under the name of the thing it replaced. Ten years on, people arriving from a dead 1987 book imprint are a measurable channel in somebody's marketing dashboard.

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