Best Buy fights ‘showrooming’ consumers with new technology
Electronics retail merchant Best Buy is hoping to fight lost sales from "showrooming" – the practice of checking out an item in-store only to buy it online later – by deploying employees with tablets to enable customers to do more research.
Employees at Best Buy stores will be given tablet devices that customers can use to research a product. If they find a different merchant with a better price, the employees are allowed to match the price. Mike Mikan, interim CEO of Best Buy, believes this strategy will improve the customer experience by showing customers the chain has their best interests in mind.
At the same time, Best Buy is also focusing on developing a stronger ecommerce presence.
"We can no longer just focus on the box," Mikan said at the shareholders meeting, as quoted by Internet Retailer. "We must focus on both the physical and virtual customer experience, and our capital investment must reflect that."
Retailers are leveraging tablets to improve store operations in a number of ways, ranging from point-of-sale (POS) payment processing to inventory management.
