Jeff W.

My company has purchased extensively from Provantage. They have been a reliable source of products, as long as you know what you are buying. I would never go onto their site without a specific manufacturer part number.

Things started to go downhill a few months ago. Lead times and "shipping delays" started to get longer and longer, and they started playing games, demanding payment without shipping products. That's against the published terms of sale on their site. Their (suddenly anonymous) customer service swore up and down that "we would never do that!" at the same time as their A/R guy did it.

This morning, I noticed that Provantage charged us for a month-old order. According to Provantage's terms of sale, that means it has shipped. But when I checked the order status to pull the tracking number, it said, "Expected ship date March 22,2021." That's over three months away! So they didn't even bother trying to get us to agree this time; they just helped themselves to nearly $1,000 more or less out of the blue.

That was the last straw.

I can't tell you what's happening at Provantage. But I can tell you how it looks: bad.

My theory is that they are way behind on paying suppliers that have now cut them off. So they're trying to scrape up the money to pay off existing debts by taking (and trying to collect payment for) orders for high-demand products (e.g., AMD Ryzen 9 CPUs, Nvidia 30X0 GPUs) they don't have and can't get.

In my experience, reputable companies don't behave this way but companies circling the drain do. I will be stunned if they are still in business in six months. That's a shame; they used to be a decent company for what they are (a thin veneer over wholesale distributors like Ingram). I hope they turn it around, but their current approach sure won't do that.