News

Best Buy combats showrooming with changes to price-matching policy

October 15, 2012

Best Buy, realizing the potentially dangerous effects of showrooming, has changed its tune on holiday season price-matching. The electronics retailer originally excluded price-matching from its 2012 shopping season policy, but according to an article on TIME.com, the chain has revised that policy. However, it's not without a catch or two.

The exceptions to the price-matching policy include:

• Prices from the Sunday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday would not be matched;
• Only the prices of 20 specified online retailers (including Amazon, but not smaller sellers) would be matched; and
• Best Buy staffers have the leeway to decide against matching prices if the store decides that’s in its best interest, the article reported. 

"Best Buy certainly needed to try something aggressive given the 'showrooming' phenomenon they were already seeing," Jonathan Marek, senior vice president at Applied Predictive Technologies, said in the article. "The problem is: Even a small loss of shoppers, say 5 percent per year, on a steady basis, spells rapid doom for a retailer with a high cost base of stores."

Read more about assisted selling.