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Best Buy Credits Web Purchases To Local Stores
from the fightin-channel-conflict dept
One of the big issues with retailers that also have a web presence is how to deal with channel conflict. How do you get sales people to point people to the web when the store employees might consider the web to be a competitor, rather than the same company? Best Buy is going around saying that they've solved this issue by crediting web sales to local stores, thus encouraging Best Buy staff to point people to the web when more appropriate. Of course, what they leave out is the fact that when Best Buy staff point shoppers to internet kiosks in the store, they might be seeing higher prices than if they went to the identical website from home.
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As I was saying
I just bought a new PC from Best Buy 3 days ago, and their web price (checked from home) was higher than the in-store retail price. The web price for www.gateway.com was higher than Best Buy's retail price too.
As far as sellers are concerned, maybe door-to-door deliveries do not have any special economic advantages? I bet net-ordered products have higher return rates, therefore increases costs for the seller. A PC box weighs a good 50 pounds too, so delivering to a residential address via UPS is more expensive than having a truck bring 100 PC's to a retail store.
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How does Best Buy determine which store gets credited? Do they just choose the branch closest to the customer's address? If so, is that where it's shipped from? (probably not)
But anyway, if they say it was bought at store # xx, (even if it's only for internal record-keeping), shouldn't they be charging sales tax on the purchase, since xx store is in the same state?
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How does Best Buy determine which store gets credited?
That's a good question, but as the article notes, they refuse to say exactly...
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Well that's peachy!
The last several times I went to my local Best Buy in an attempt to purchase an item I saw on their website, (because I do sometimes like to buy and have the thing "right now" instead of waiting), they didn't even stock the dang things in the store...
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