Article

Tips for embracing showrooming during the holidays

In a surprising move, Best Buy is wholeheartedly embracing showrooming this holiday season. What gives?

December 16, 2013

By Dr. Gary Edwards, chief customer officer

Mindshare Technologies

In recent years, showrooming has been perceived as the bane of brick-and-mortar retail — a pesky practice in which consumers interact with merchandise in the physical store space and then purchase the product from a competitor online.

But in a surprising move, Best Buy is wholeheartedly embracing showrooming this holiday season and encouraging consumers to use their stores as “the ultimate holiday showroom.” 

So what gives? Has Best Buy lost its mind or do the retailer’s decision-makers know something that the decision-makers at many other brick-and-mortar retail brands don’t?

Leveraging showrooming for holiday success

For many retailers, the fear of showrooming is based primarily on price competition — and for good reason. Consumers care about price and use mobile technologies to search for the best deal. In fact, some consumers have even demonstrated their willingness to purchase holiday merchandise from an online competitor while they are interacting with the product in a brick-and-mortar retail store.

But what Best Buy and a handful of other retailers have come to understand is that not all retail products are commoditized. Although price matters, it isn’t the only dimension consumers look for in an exceptional holiday shopping experience. And in many cases, the price advantage online retailers have enjoyed can be neutralized through other in-store strategies. 

With that in mind, there are a few strategies that brick-and-mortar retailers can use this holiday season to embrace showrooming and convert it into retail success:

Omnichannel Integration. Showrooming as a negative concept is grounded on the notion that online-only retailers can beat their brick and mortar counterparts by cutting costs of distribution and sending this value on to their customers. However, it overlooks the obvious fact that most buyers in the majority of retail categories continue to need the “intimacy” of trying something on or having tactile interaction to see how it works for them, never mind still often enjoying the shopping experience itself. By leveraging physical store space to offer enhanced multichannel shopping opportunities, retailers can capture business from online competitors. When done well, omnichannel integration combines online, social, mobile and in-store resources to deliver an experience that far surpasses the experiences offered by online competitors.

Customer Service. Customer service is an area in which brick-and-mortar retailers can excel, especially since many pure-play online retailers often have no in-person support. The key is to avoid populating stores with inexperienced sales teams who can’t help customers with questions about the products. Although a certain number of temporary hires may be unavoidable during the holiday season, it’s important to adequately train all sales team members to provide exceptional service and to monitor the quality of customer service by collecting structured and unstructured customer feedback during this busy shopping time of year.

Price Matching.Rather than running away from price comparisons, some brick-and-mortar retailers are running toward it and actually encouraging shoppers to use smartphones or other technologies to perform instant price-based research. Best Buy uses price matching to motivate shoppers to make the purchase — a strategy that brick-and-mortar retailers can leverage to improve holiday revenues and to create customer experiences that keep shoppers coming back throughout the year.

Like it or not, showrooming isn’t going away. Although it presents new challenges to brick-and-mortar retail, showrooming can also be harnessed as a way to increase revenues and more importantly, to improve the quality of the customer experiences provided to customers during the holidays. While some of the above strategies such as price-matching may be harder for retailers to leverage without moving the bottom line, the combination of one or more of the above can be a step in the right direction for strong sales this holiday season.

Dr. Gary Edwards is chief customer officer at Mindshare Technologies, a global provider of Voice of the Customer (VoC) solutions. (Photo by Intel Free Press.)