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Comment by LargeWu | Hacker News Reader

I hear this all the time from Best Buy sympathizers. The question I don't hear getting asked is "Why are they then buying from Amazon, and not bestbuy.com?" The reason is that Best Buy doesn't want its online business cannibalizing their in store business, so they keep their online prices in line with b&m. As a result, they lose the sale in both places.

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While I'm sure that the prices are a big factor, the only one I care about is: their site is fucking terrible. It's insanely difficult to navigate, the search is atrocious, and finding out what's available online versus in stores is just painful.

There are several Best Buys near me, and I'd love to buy stuff online and go run and pick it up when I find that it's available in one of the stores. Every single time I've tried, I ended up going to Amazon and just getting it the next day that way.

I don't care about the price, I just want it to work.

I understand that Best Buy has to pay to keep their stores stocked, having physical space to showcase products and let people play with them requires a huge investment that Amazon doesn't have, yet at the same time they charge 2x sometimes even 3x more without giving me anything but the convenience of testing it out without having to receive the product and sending it back to Amazon...

If Best Buy dropped its prices to something reasonable I would be more inclined to purchase my electronics in their store right there and then because there is something to be said for the convenience of instantly having the product in my hands rather than having to wait for something to ship from a warehouse, it just isn't worth 2 or 3 times the price.

The WSJ had an article on showrooming just the other day: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230458770457733...

Another hypothesis is that Best Buy can't afford to match Amazon's prices on bestbuy.com because they are subsidizing the online retailers with their in-person show rooms.

(I'm not a Best Buy sympathizer, just a hypothesis)

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