
Case study: Can retailers win back shoppers who browse then buy online? - Oatseller
https://hbr.org/2015/06/case-study-can-retailers-win-back-shoppers-who-browse-then-buy-online
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a3n
I do the opposite. I don't want to spend the time driving around looking at
stuff, so I research online, and then find where it's sold locally. 'cause I
want it the instant I pay for it, and returns are much easier and immediate at
a store.

I do buy from Amazon, but Amazon is also one of the best research tools for
local buying.

~~~
alistairSH
I'm shocked that people continue to "showroom" items. The local Best Buy has a
terrible selection of items and the employees don't know any more about the
products than I do. It doesn't make any sense to go to Best Buy for anything
at all - there is almost literally zero value added by a big chain electronics
store.

~~~
hfsktr
I can think of a few things that you just need to see or feel.

I was shopping for a monitor and all the reviews on Amazon are great but I
can't see the difference on my current monitor or what it actually looks like
despite all the specs listed.

I did buy it on Amazon but only after I saw the actual differences in store.

~~~
Applejack
Yeah for something like a tv or monitor, you have to see it in person or
you're rolling the dice. How's the glare? How does it look from other angles
beside straight on? Hows this 4K res compare to the one next to it?

Even if Amazon could provide a Hololens sessions for me to look at the product
(which maybe they should do at some future Amazon retail location) alongside
all the specs and reviews, it's still not going to bridge the gap of seeing it
in person.

~~~
craftkiller
Amazon could integrate that into Amazon Prime Now (1 hour delivery service).
They could charge a small showroom fee and have a driver go out with a "floor
model" they keep at the warehouse and an unopened box model for if you want to
buy it on the spot.

~~~
a3n
Wow. The value of human time is incredibly low, if that can be made to work.

I have this thought every time I see a sign waiver.

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zellyn
Heh. They're dead right about the difficulty of cutting through a million
options. I feel lame every time, but I find myself just going to
thesweethome.com or thewirecutter.com, and then buying whatever they tell me
to :-/ Either online or locally, whichever is more convenient and/or cheaper.

~~~
waspleg
tl;dr - My best isn't necessarily your best. We're different people with
(likely) different needs.

That seems pretty foreign to me. While I would definitely look at something
like that (although I've never heard of either of those sites until now,
thanks), it seems weird to me that people would assume what some website
thinks is "best" is so accurate as to accept their recommendation without
doing any research whatsoever and immediately going out to buy that.

Even when I was a kid and had a Consumer Reports subscription I never just
bought whatever they said to buy I have always done my own research. It
doesn't seem that difficult to me if you have at least a rough idea of what
you're looking for in an item and can prioritize those things.

~~~
TeMPOraL
TL;DR: there are products that fulfill your, mine and everyone elses needs
simultaneously quite well.

Products in a given category aren't usually trading off their features and
price perfectly. There are some products that are significantly better than
their competitors in all metrics at the same time; then most of the products
in any given category are a mix of weird attempts at market segmentation and
companies trying to simply scam you. Therefore it's not surprising one can
often select a product that is objectively the best for vast majority of
potential buyers.

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falcolas
I'd buy more locally if there was more locally to buy. I know it's a small
town, but the availability of seemingly common electronics is atrocious. I
can't locate, let alone buy, a monitor with greater than 1920x1080 resolution
within 100 miles. A keyboard with decent mechanical switches, any form of non-
toy quadcopter, even a Raspberry Pi/Arduino/Beaglebone? Somewhere in Seattle
or Phoenix, if I'm lucky.

I'd kill to have a Fry's in the state.

About the only form of electronics I'm set for in-town is headphones, and
that's just because Headroom was built up from this city.

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dsfyu404ed
Another thing to note is that the auto parts industry does a pretty good job
leveraging tools like Amazon and eBay. Autozone, Advance, Summit etc. They
have stores and websites but also use those platforms to sell stuff and the
price is generally consistent with their websites and stores or reflects the
cost of using the platform (e.g. buying stuff from Summit is usually slightly
cheaper for the stuff they list on eBay and I assume this is a reflection of
shipping discounts.

Obviously, a franchise can't really take advantage of additional platforms the
way a chain can.

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mrweasel
Where online really wins for me is that I don't have go shopping along with
hundreds or even thousand of other people after work or in the weekends.

I get extremely cranky when I need to stand in line or try to make my way
passed other "less efficient" shoppers.

Also the stupid attempts at up-selling in electronic stores doesn't help.

Clothing I do prefer to shop in real stores though, but that's mostly because
sizes aren't uniform and generally confusing.

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AdmiralAsshat
Here's one thing brick-and-mortar stores could try learning from online
retailers: stop bugging your customers.

If I need help looking for a TV, I'll ask. I promise, I'm not shy. But if I
want to just LOOK at some TV's and see what's available, please stop hovering
over my shoulder and asking me if I have any questions. I don't, really. I can
read the specs. If you want me to spend $400 or more on something, you're
gonna have to grant me some time to chew over the options and go home and do
my research before coming back. Let me do that, and I might come back and buy
from you. Pester me, stalk me, or refuse to let me leave without making veiled
threats that "This TV may not be here when you come back," and I'll shop
online.

For its part, Micro Center guys have usually been extremely helpful when I
needed it and have always left me alone once I said "Just browsing." They've
also periodically looked up the part on Newegg to see if they could price-
match it.

~~~
DanBC
...and yet some people report feeling ignored by shop staff.

Is there any research into the ideal balance between asking people if they
need help and not bugging them?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Is there room for an app here, where you can declare your need for help, and
the store can respond (by queuing it or whatever)?

~~~
lfowles
An app? The solution has existed for decades without being more complex than a
lightbulb.. hit a button that turns on a light in the area so staff can come
help you.

The specific case I'm thinking of was buying a graphing calculator that was
locked in a case. Hit the button and someone will come by to get you one. Same
concept on airplanes too, though.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Except, no queuing, no estimate of when they'll get to you, no idea if anyone
will ever show up at all.

Complaints about bad service are epidemic. I'm thinking there's room for
disruption here.

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rbcgerard
For what its worth I basically use a two axis model for my likelihood to buy
online vs. retail one axis is time frame (do i need that bathing suit right
now or can i wait two weeks) this is really product agnostic - basically I'll
pay a (potential) time/money premium to get something now.

the second axis is commodity vs. customization/fit on one end of the spectrum
are standardized things (AA batteries, a DVD, part #12345) that i'll pretty
much always buy online, the middle of that spectrum is stuff that you'd like
to see in person you but would be willing to buy online (i.e. showroom): a
watch (see it on your wrist first) furniture (how big is that couch). At the
other end of the spectrum are things with a value added service that retailer
does that i will buy in the store, something like ski boots or hockey skates
where i want to try on a few, the salesman are more knowledgeable, and there
is a customization/fitting process (custom footbeds or heat treatment)

~~~
sanderjd
The time axis is being eroded by the speed of delivery. If I order something
from Amazon on a weekday, I almost always have it the next morning. For me,
there is a very small window between "want it _now_ " and "want it by tomorrow
morning". For me currently, that window is basically just restaurants and
groceries, which could be eliminated with better planning.

The in-store value add is a real thing, and what I think a lot of stores are
going for, but for most things, the best they can do are knowledgeable
salespeople, whose knowledge will never be as useful as research on the
internet. I can only think of one other example where I really want a good
salesperson besides ski boots: "important" clothing, like a nice suit, that
benefits from professional tailoring.

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Jemaclus
If I were opening a book store today, I'd do two things:

1\. I'd put Amazon affiliate links everywhere. If you want to buy it from
Amazon while browsing my store, go for it. I'll just get a cut of the sale via
my affiliate link.

2\. If you buy a Kindle version via Amazon, I'll discount you on the hard copy
that you buy from my store. That way you'll have both versions, if desired.

I have absolutely no idea if this would be effective, but I think one thing
booksellers are going to have to do to stay competitive is adopt something
like this, where you're not shutting the customer down. I'm one of those
people who browses the store and then buys on Amazon, but that's mainly
because I have a Kindle with hundreds of books, and I only buy hard copies of
my favorites. If a store enabled that -- and profited from -- then that would
be awesome. I'd love to give a small kickback to my local store for showing me
what's available, even if I bought it from Amazon in the end.

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dubroff
Off-topic: I couldn't find anything online about Benjy's, aside from the HBR
article. Anyone know what's going on?

~~~
TheAdamist
Its either a made up company for the case study, or pseudonym for best buy.
The case study teaching notes refer to best buy instead of "benjy's".

------
DenisM
The article is an advertising piece for Wayfair, and doesn't even try to hide
it.

The truth is that retailers, especially large retailers have a lot of tools to
fight back against e-tailers:

\- Demanding manufacturers to set and enforce Minimal Advertised Price.

\- Exclusive products. If Macy's ask for a new product to be theirs only, they
usually get their wish granted.

\- Geo lockout. Smaller retailers are granted geo-local monopoly.

\- Custom SKUs to thwart price lookups and price matches. Samsung makes the
same TV in BestBuy SKU, Sears SKU, Costco SKU, generic SKU, and likely others.

\- Own ecomerce portals, like Macy's or Nordstrom.

\- Local returns and repairs.

And that's not all of it. At our startup we're making many of these tools
available to smaller retailers and manufacturers, if you want to join, my
email is in profile. In particular we're hot on post-visit engagement
workflow, the stuff of the 21st century.

Retail is far from dead. If it were, they wouldn't need the advertising piece
in HBR.

~~~
Eridrus
Besides the local repairs, all of these seem to attempt to stop people from
being able to purchase the items you can see in store cheaper online, which
makes the assumption that if the shopper can't find the item cheaper online
they will purchase it in store.

It seems unlikely that a shopper savvy enough to have an item recognition app
is going to not know what the online price is for a similar item, even if it's
not identical.

Consumers obviously assign some value to being able to see the actual item,
but it's not clear that the value is as high as you need to sustain a retail
operation vs a generous returns policy.

------
joesmo
After Amazon threatened to close my paid Prime account because I was returning
too many things (totally false) I'm now going back to the brick and mortar
stores too. As more and more people get alienated by policies that aren't even
written down, applied transparently and randomly by stupid algorithms, I think
more people will deal with the inconvenience of shopping in person or at the
very least look for online retailers that don't tell their paying customers
who have been spending $10-30k a year regularly for many years to go fuck
themselves.

I think there's a lot of chances for retails stores as people realize that the
promise of online technologies is incredibly hindered by their actualization
and the artificial limits imposed by such unscrupulous vendors as Amazon.

------
Qantourisc
Sometimes I wonder why nobody opens a showroom that doesn't sell products, but
only shows stuff. (At a fee of course.)

But it might cost too much to finance all the products you wish/have to show.
Manufactures can help and donate demo gear :)

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's called a trade show, and pretty much every type of product has some. I
agree that there could be a room between them and shops, i.e. small-scale
displays, but at this point why not just let one buy the stuff?

~~~
sanderjd
Trade shows are temporary. The advantage of a permanent showroom is that
people know they can always go look at things right now.

> why not just let one buy the stuff?

Because then the store needs inventory, and all the overhead that entails. It
is much cheaper to keep a single copy of everything.

But the perhaps bigger issue is one of incentives. I hate that when I'm at
Best Buy looking at things, I know I'm being an annoying "showroomer", rather
than a customer doing the correct and desired thing. Removing on-site sales
from the equation aligns the incentives. Now the showroom will want to do
whatever they can to make it _easier_ for me to buy online, so that they get
credit (and presumably commission) for the sale. Instead of trickery to
confuse object recognition apps, maybe they'll make a really good augmented
reality app that makes it stupidly easy to one-click order the exact thing
they're looking at.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Thanks, you wrote some good points I haven't considered. You've actually
convinced me and now I wish for a permanent showroom too. I wonder, maybe
electronics stores will slowly evolve towards that? Order on-line and pick up
at store is already a thing, and the second part of the equation would be just
a streamlined mobile buying experience.

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mark_lee
I can’t believe that kind of people do exist.

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kelukelugames
We have a game store where you can go to play the board games and buy the ones
you like. It's crowded but I don't know if people actually purchases things.

~~~
VLM
Looks can also be deceiving, because of "Friday Night Magic" at least for one
evening a week what is believed to be an independent FLGS is actually a junk
food convenience store at least WRT revenue by product. Or so I've been told
by someone who should know. There are other theme nights, its just "Friday
Night Magic" is the most popular.

Its not a very profitable or well run convenience store compared to a real
convenience store, but it does well enough. As do most FLGS that run friday
night magic. I'm sure there are some that can't sell junk food due to zoning
or ordinances, that must be annoying.

The problem is scaling it outside a couple hours Friday night. Another day of
the week, six guys playing pathfinder on a card table makes the store look
busy compared to a usually completely empty antique store, but what kind of
revenue is rolling in per hour? You can pay the electric bill by selling
monster energy drinks out of the cooler, but retail establishments have other
bills to pay, and the antique store only needs one sale per week to pay their
bills...

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Just for contrast, our local card store has 8 tables available for whatever.
They also have Magic tournaments, MechWarrior tables, a variety of things.
They make their money selling - you guessed it, card games. The other half of
the store is aisles of boxed games, old and new.

The tables get busy every evening of the week, after folks get out of
school/off work. The age range is teens through 30-somethings.

------
ck2
Instant gratification and no shipping cost on larger items is the only way
local stores can deal with Amazon.

Somehow Best Buy is still in business so they must be doing that.

------
VLM
Its interesting that none of the case study results faced reality; you're
obsolete, pivot or close. Lots of long winded meandering that boils down to
fiddling while rome burns. You've got legacy revenue for awhile, real estate,
and employees, take advantage of it and pivot. "I know, we'll try to undercut
the entire internet" LOL "We'll just work harder than everyone else" LOL
"We'll sell only the most expensive products to the richest customers because
they like to waste time" LOL "We'll define excellent service as being
obnoxious and in your face as possible" LOL The first consultant is
featherbedding "We need more consultants to get more data".

For example, Barnes and Noble has abandoned selling books and has pivoted semi
successfully into "convenience store for birthday gifts" complete with
wrapping. They still have a section of the store for books, but its not really
a book store anymore. They have a better chocolate section than my local
discount grocery store! In the specific example, moving in on B+N turf isn't
going to work as a strategy unless you think you can out B+N, B+N itself.

AFAIK no one has ever tried food and consumer electronics shopping, so eat
"real" food while showrooming sample TVs and then order one shipped to your
door. This is not entirely insane. A liquor license and pleasant wait staff
might discourage showrooming... "Hey everyone gets a round on the house, Joey
bought a new TV" woo hoo ...

Something to think about is there is more retail CRE square footage today than
ever in the history of the country and its all more or less becoming useless
as currently designed and zoned. You may end up pivoting totally out of old
fashioned retail, perhaps a fitness club, or barber shop, or restaurant. You
want to be the first retail market to become an exercise club not try to be
the last. Locally food and other retail stores that have closed have
successfully opened as credit union branches, exercise club, restaurants, and
car dealerships, more examples probably exist. To make a large scale national
strategy, it might be useful to gather this small scale success data.
Apparently you cannot pay the rent selling turnips in that specific retail
frontage, but you can pay the rent selling time on a bench press machine,
interesting...

Alternately you can ride right down into a crater, like that crazy general in
Dr Strangelove, if it no longer works just keep on doing what doesn't work but
harder than everyone else, what could possibly go wrong? In all honesty if you
have no future it does show bravery of a sort to keep doing what you're doing
until the bankruptcy, but admit what you're doing, at least, you're just
riding a dead business model until impact with the ground, milking the last
cash cow till it becomes pink slime.

~~~
mindslight
Yeah, I can't help but scream at every one of their lame proposals: This is
what drives people to buy online in the first place!

What's never mentioned is simply having their every day price match the online
prices. But this is so glaringly obvious I assume it's simply financially
impractical. I've really got to wonder what kind of margins they have to
bridge?

Lobbying their state to drop sales tax and being 5-10% higher than online, but
being _open_ about it and marketing based on immediate service _might_ work.
Then again if it's a 30% chasm the situation seems quite hopeless.

As an aside, I wonder if they could get manufacturers to supply floor models
gratis, or even paying a little for exhibition. After all, a brick and mortar
store is essentially a giant billboard. Much better than some "minimum
advertised price" anti-competitive bullshit.

------
kefka
Sigh. I will buy online for most things. Things I don't: groceries, clothes.
(Why: Our meat guy takes orders and we pay and pick up. Avg bill~$55. Grocery
doesn't have automated picking -krogers-. Would use it if we could.)

Now, why do I buy online? There's many reasons.

1\. I'm price sensitive. I don't make that much, so my money must count. Doing
X means not doing Y, even for small values of X. Online is just cheaper.

2\. Your place doesn't have what I want. I've went into electronics stores,
looking for X. Except what I see is some version less and something much
higher. Or they play with model names, where kwin-123xyz-tgt is at Target and
kwin123xyz-wmt is at Walmart, and have no differences, other than a model ID
that's dependent on store, to prevent price matching.

3\. Salespeople are idiots. I've had them try to "inform" me of all sorts of
inane "Its really true that..." and other lies or mistruths. I don't need your
research, salesperson. Nor do I think you deserve your commission for your BS.

4\. Salespeople are pushy (and worse; hard sell). Nothing turns me off from
shopping than that behavior. I hate it, and will walk out as soon as they
start engaging in it. One case I went back to them after making the sale and
told them that their hard sell is why they did __not __make the sale.

5\. Lines suck. As in, really suck. I have the non-choice of waiting in a too
long line for some disinterested clerk to ring stuff up. Compare this to
Amazon and other web stores where I can click buttons and "BUY....DONE!".
Yeah, there's shipping. But I can get on with my day. Lines suck time I'll
never get back.

6\. Other shoppers. We're approaching the 'Black Days', where you will be
neck-to-neck with other crazed deal-going shoppers. Some are in various states
of unbathedness whilst many others are completely rude. The net eliminates
this, completely... unless you go to forums like Reddit and intentionally find
areas like /r/SRS

7\. Going to another store = loads to time. I'm looking around 5 mins to park
and walk, 10 mins to find, and 5 mins to pay, and 2 mins to leave. Total 22
mins. On the net, I can search a dozen stores at the same time. And nobody
complains if I search another company while on the first's web site.

8\. I don't get real-time reviews on items in store. I have to rely on the box
(marketing), the ads (more marketing), and general feel if there's a sample.
Online, I can see the reviews of pretty much anything, can analyze trends in
good and bad, and can make a generally informed decision.

9\. Pricing issues. I regularly get problems with incorrect prices on things.
Usually it's taken care of, but turns out to be a big "Stop registers, send
someone to look, and report back". Retarded and inefficient.

10\. Coupons/cards. I have an account on some eCommerce site. Or I use Paypal
directly and not make an account. It just works. Versus the brick and mortar
stores, where they play games with "discounts, but not this way, and not here,
but only on that with that". And you need those damned shopper cards. It's one
thing to have a single card, but every store wants you to have one.

That enough reasons why?

~~~
waspleg
I agree with all of this. For your sales people getting paid on commission
they will, of course, flat out lie and try to up sell you things or combine
those together to say they're out of something they have and try to sell you
something more expensive because you look like you need it (I'm looking at you
Fry's).

