Category: Showrooming
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For some Retailers, Black Friday should be renamed Brown Friday
When I was in elementary school I had to do a project on my family’s history. I asked my father if any of our ancestors had been war heroes. He went on to tell the following story: In the 1700’s a great grandfather many generations back had been an Admiral in the Royal Navy. One…
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PRICE MATCHING: Have Retailers Created a Monster?
Price matching is a known margin killer. Yet, the fear of losing in-store sales to on-line competitors has retailers aggressively implementing discretionary price-matching policies. In the past, all sellers had very similar cost structures. Store hours and location convenience played a significant role in consumer behavior. In order to utilize price-matching, a consumer had to:…
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Channel Conflict…The Ugly Truth About Growing On-line Sales
“Increasing our on-line penetration is the key to our future sales growth.” This line has been uttered so many times, in so many ways, by so many corporate leaders in CPG, in the last five years that it now falls into its own special class of cliché. On the surface this phrase makes perfect sense.…
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Win or Lose, Retailing in an Omni-Channel world is a Team Sport
I have been a player, captain, coach, referee, and spectator of team sports for the better part of three decades. I have always been amazed at the parallels between business and sports. When reflecting on the day’s events, be it a game or a business challenge, I often find myself concluding “it all comes down…
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Internet Price Risk…Buyer Beware
As the summer winds down, the all-important fall buying season for retailers is heating up. While the role of the retail buyer has never been easy, the advances in technology, savvy online retailers, as well as increased use of mobile devices, the job is now infinitely more challenging. Historically, retail buyers have managed a series…
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Is Best Buy’s Showrooming Strategy Flawed?
About a year ago I blogged that “Showrooming is no longer a sideshow, but now the main event”. (Showrooming is the practice of evaluating an item at a retail outlet, and subsequently purchasing the item online for a much lower price.) In this blog I went to great pains to show that showrooming risk impacts…
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Retail Showrooming is Dead
According to a recent IBM report, retailers should no longer feel threatened by the practice of retail showrooming. Time to pop the champagne, right? Retail showrooming is a known margin killer and according to the IBM report, it now occurs at so such low levels, as to not constitute a measurable threat. So rest easy,…
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It’s Midnight on the Internet
It’s Midnight on the internet…do you know where your brands are? The honest truth is, that for most of us, the answer is no. Like the naïve parents of teenage children, we don’t precisely know where brands are, but like to think that all is well. It’s not until the phone rings at one in…
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How Showrooming Impacts Earnings
Showrooming is no longer a sideshow. For C-Level executives it has become the main event. The extensive press coverage of the demise of Best Buy was a wake-up call for both brands and retailers. Showrooming is not just simply a nuisance, it can actually bring down a major retailer. The fact that both Target and…
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The Showrooming Scorecard
“If Showrooming is so pervasive, why aren’t companies doing more to combat it?” This is a question we are hearing more and more. Companies, be it brands or retailers, realize that this problem is reaching epidemic proportions, yet seem to be doing little to change the dynamic. Why? We can’t manage what we don’t measure.…