What experience in the store can overcome showrooming?
The Future of Retail
If I understand correctly, the customer experience at Best Buy will be: (1) drive to the store, (2) hope there’s enough product information to make an informed choice, (3) check the Amazon app to see if Best Buy’s price is higher, (4) find a salesperson, (5) ask them point blank to match Amazon’s price, (6) convince them that it “makes sense” to do so, (7) wait in the checkout line to pay, and (8) drive home. The alternative is to stay home and (1) open the Amazon app, (2) read the product information and reviews, and (3) tap the “buy” button. It doesn’t look good for Best Buy, at least in that comparison. But there’s another way to think about it.Mark Hurst of Creative Good
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Let’s face it – technology continues to advance, and we simply haven’t managed to keep up…even when it comes to competing with apps. It will become increasingly imperative to hire, train and develop sales experts if big box retailers are to compete with the growing trend of showrooming. I would think this represents a critical shift in the way many retailers perform day to day business. The hiring practices of simply finding personnel to fill shifts and run registers are both far too menial and antiquated. Retailers will need to either invest in proven sales individuals or training – recognizing the need to have brand experts readily available to teach us – the consumer. Understanding the concept that comes from empowering consumers with knowledge is key to both the retailer, and the customer. It can’t stop there – retailers must offer incentives for customers to make the purchase, then. One stop shop, if you will. Many retailers offer a price match guarantee if you can show the identical product offered somewhere else at a lower price. Or, you might start a marketing campaign inviting consumers to come in for demonstrations, or skills101 classes. For example, Best Buy could offer electronics installation classes, or incentives for purchasing items at the time of demonstrations – we are all suckers for FREE GIFT with PURCHASE. Buy the DVD Player, get a FREE DVD…With that, at the end of the day, I still want to speak to someone – face to face. This basic interaction makes me feel better about my purchases, and more in control of my investments.
You are exactly right Michelle retail stores need to do more to secure their market especially as consumers have an option to buy online which is sometimes deemed convenient in the sense that one can just click a button and buy stuff without having to drive to the store deal with weather, parking traffic long lines at the cashier or even the risk of getting a traffic violation. It is also true that online shopping also has its disadvantages but this is up to the retail stores to fight that with an incentive that will bring customers to their store especially the incentives you mentioned in your posting. Retail stores need to offer product education buy not just regular sales reps but by reps who have very advance product knowledge to clear customers doubts and assure customers that their purchase is exactly what it is something the online stores are doing to a limited extent by providing sales operators although we are not exactly sure if they have good knowledge about the product. We are the customers the stores have to give us a convincing reason why we have to buy from them especially when we can buy from a lot of places..
In the broader sense, this seems to be THE future of retail. We all know that internet shopping has become the number one method of shopping for anything. Whether it’s clothes, shoes, accessories, electrical, and everything else. People seem to rely on that quite most often due to various reasons. They can sit at home and check out different websites and compare the prices and quality of the products, check on the internet about the positive and negative aspects of the products, read the reviews, and then decide to purchase it. This will save them time, maybe some money potentially, and also give them a piece of mind that they made this decision after careful consideration. Why would they want to make a trip to stores, wait in line, get interrupted by other people and so on, when they can just get the same service when they shop from home. Some offers that the retailers make through advertisements these days could actually attract a lot of customers to the stores. Let’s say, first 100 customers to buy the Xbox in the store gets 2 new game series for free when purchased within so and so day. This will definitely make the crazy Xbox lovers to go and buy things at the store. Some kind of offer has to be offered by retailers to get people to buy things from them now. Even then, I do believe that speaking with someone does help quite a lot to make decisions about the things I want to buy.