On Friday, Gateway came forward with a business management related announcement, saying it would cease commercializing PCs through its own website, thus taking on a new approach: it plans to use third-party stores and other types of online retailers for selling its products.

This won’t be something entirely new for the company, as it has been selling computers through partner stores for the past four years. Now however, direct online sales will be taken out for the obvious reason of cutting down costs and for the more obscure reason of wanting to assimilate the business model of its parent company Acer. Gateway was acquired by Acer last year for $710 million in the latter’s attempt to augment its influence in North America.

Gateway PCs can be purchased at CompUSA, Costco, HSN, Newegg, Tiger Direct, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Circuit City.

Obviously enough, the process the company is going through has brought and will probably continue to bring about staff cuts. Lisa Emard, a Gateway spokeswoman, said the reductions have been applied in small, successive waves as evaluations have gradually been carried out for each department and function.

According to David Daoud, research manager at IDC, the changes that are currently being made will eventually help Gateway in the market battle against Dell and Hewlett-Packard. He went on to say that Gateway’s stopping online sales could also be related to Acer’s intention to replace certain Gateway brands with some of its own.

Acquiring Gateway turned out to be a good move for Acer; on the US market the latter was in a very close race with Apple to become the third-largest PC retailer.