Wal-Mart told all store managers to match online prices with Amazon
reuters.com
reuters.com
When I was young, my friend's dad managed the K-Mart in our town. In the 70's and early 80's, K-Mart gave a lot of autonomy to store managers to set sale prices and do promotions. He would nearly always have loss-leader sales going for basic stuff like toothpaste and laundry detergent. He assumed that if he could just get customers in the door for toothpaste, they'd buy enough other stuff to make up for the loss. It worked, too. After a while, many people didn't even bother stopping by Target. K-Mart finally forbade loss-leaders in the late 80's, his sales tanked, and he quit to become a buyer for another chain. The K-Mart is still there, but it's a ghost town compared to Target and Wal-Mart.
I wonder if Wal-Mart can pull off the reverse of what my friend's dad did. Could they get people who ordinarily wouldn't think of going to Wal-Mart in the habit shopping there by discounting big things?
I don't even want to think about how badly amazon's warehouse employees are treated. (Although I've read one long account that wasn't good).
But Amazon has made the purchasing process so smooth, that it's hard to resist.
Also some people like to get it the same day. If it doesn't work they can also return it the same day and then get something else. If Wal-Mart advertises price matching, they will appeal to those people.
A lot of Americans still believe in brick-and-mortar stores. People line up for days before Black Friday to get in to these stores to get a "deal". I never understood the level of desperation and what would drive someone to spend that much time in the cold. But people do it and stores play along.
Best Buy will also do online price-matching, for certain major online retailers like Amazon: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/help-topics/price-match-guarante...
By comparison Amazon can buy a warehouse in the middle of nowhere and stack items as high as they will go.
I know places like Best Buy had computers scattered all over the place and salespeople could bring up a browser and check the price themselves.
Wal-Mart doesn't have that. Do they trust you bringing up a price on a smartphone and showing them the screen? Do you need to go to the customer service counter and they look it up there? Could you show them a faked screencap/print of an Amazon page and they would trust that as legit?
But when there's a big price difference, say on a high-ticket item, it's totally worth the time because you can save money while walking right out of the store with the item, instead of waiting on shipping.
So high-end baby items (automated swings), TVs, laptops, and the like.
I would rather wait the two days (Prime member) or pay the $4/extra for one day shipping versus having to go to Walmart. Waiting in line for 15-20 minutes to checkout? Possibly not finding the item or its not in stock? Lack of helpful staff (not that I blame them!). Nope Nope Nope.
(via http://allthingsd.com/20131010/how-jeff-bezos-crushed-diaper...)
"Amazon has a secretive unit — dubbed Competitive Intelligence — responsible for ordering large quantities of goods from competitors to analyze their businesses. This division eventually became aware of Diapers.com and its parent company Quidsi, and dispatched M&A chief Jeff Blackburn to initiate acquisition discussions.
Quidsi’s founders originally rebuffed acquisition offers from Amazon. So Bezos’s Amazon sent them a message, Stone [author of a book on Bezos and Amazon called 'The Everything Store'] explains:
“Soon after, Quidsi noticed Amazon dropping prices up to 30 percent on diapers and other baby products,” Stone writes. “As an experiment, Quidsi executives manipulated their prices and then watched as Amazon’s website changed its prices accordingly. Amazon’s pricing bots — software that carefully monitors other companies’ prices and adjusts Amazon’s to match — were tracking Diapers.com.” Diapers.com revenue growth eventually slowed under Amazon’s pricing pressure, and the founders engaged in acquisition talks, agreeing to a $540 million buyout.
As Stone tells it, Walmart eventually made Quidsi a better offer of $600 million, but it was too late by then.
“The Quidsi executives stuck with Amazon, largely out of fear,” Stone writes."
I haven't found Amazon UK particularly 'cheap' for the past couple of years at least, usually their day-to-day prices are about the same as mainstream and sometimes rise quite markedly for short periods.
Their primary advantage here seems to be centralised shopping and convenience of payment.
An example was a book on which they were offering 3 pence discount on the RRP. Hardly worth bothering about, but very low friction to buy from them instead of another site offering £1 off because my payment and delivery details are already lodged with Amazon.
The only reason I would even waste my time with a manager is if the price difference is huge and there's a chance of me returning it because the product didn't work out...other wise I'd just pay an extra dollar, or wait a day or two from Amazon.
Their site is a real mess at times and just finding a store with the item you want can be a real hassle. If anything it probably drives more to other stores than the stores themselves
* MITM attack on a Walmart's internet connection that routes Amazon.com through a custom proxy which lowers prices even further.
I could pull up a product on my Android smartphone in Chrome and see one price, while a manager on their iPhone browsing Amazon in Safari might get something a few dollars different.
[1] http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/lawsuit-alleges-amazon-c...