Boost Profit Margins with Depot Repairs

July 16, 2015

Palm Trees

A consistent trend with IT hardware is that prices drop! As technology advances the cost of new IT equipment goes down or (sometimes) the functionality that you get with each new generation of hardware increases while the price remains constant. And so, the trend has been to throw out the old equipment and buy shiny new hardware every few years. This process often makes sense with much of the lower end hardware such as PCs, monitors and desktop printers, but for higher priced hardware, not so much.


For high end IT hardware – such as RFID devices, barcode equipment, POS hardware and networking devices – it often makes sense to repair, rather than replace. Certainly for large companies with hundreds or thousands of users the cost to continually refresh equipment can be very high. For such companies too, standardization is important. Logistically companies have to settle on specific manufacturers and types of IT equipment, otherwise management of them becomes too unwieldy.


So, unless there are great leaps in functionality with the new hardware or security flaws with the old, it often makes sense to repair hardware rather than to continually replace it. A cost effective way to do this is with a depot repair company. Depending on the specific equipment, a reliable depot repair company can normally fix equipment at 20% to 50% of the replacement cost, which can give you huge cost savings. Repaired equipment should come with a comprehensive warranty; six months is often typical. Also, if an item cannot be fixed for any reason then they normally won’t charge you. Although your repaired equipment won’t be new, you’ll know that it was cost effectively and reliably repaired and will continue doing its job for a long time to come.

July 20, 2026
You planned the budget. You got leadership buy-in. You placed the order. Then the pallets arrived, and everything started to fall apart. It happens more often than most IT leaders want to admit. The planning phase of a hardware rollout gets intense scrutiny. The selection process is thorough. But the actual staging and deployment? It often gets treated as an afterthought, right up until the moment it becomes a crisis. Here's why the rollout phase is where IT projects go wrong, and what it takes to get it right.
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OEM repair contracts cost more than you think. See how third-party depot repair cuts turnaround times, parts costs, and downtime for multi-location IT fleets.
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Zebra scanners, mobile computers, and printers play a key role in retail, logistics, warehousing, transportation, and fulfillment operations. From scanning inventory and tracking shipments to printing labels and supporting real-time workflows, Zebra devices help to keep daily operations moving. But even rugged Zebra hardware is not immune to wear and tear. Broken screens, failed scan engines, Wi-Fi issues, damaged triggers, and cracked casings can quickly slow teams down. For companies operating across multiple locations, failed scanners can create more than a minor inconvenience. It can delay orders, disrupt workflows, and increase pressure on already busy IT teams. That is why having a reliable third-party repair partner is so important. Mercom helps organizations repair, maintain, and extend the life of their Zebra hardware, keeping devices in service longer and reducing the need for costly replacements.
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