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The article is an advertising piece for Wayfair, and doesn't even try to hide it. The truth is that retailers, especially large retailers have a lot of tools t
by DenisM 11y ago
The article is an advertising piece for Wayfair, and doesn't even try to hide it.
The truth is that retailers, especially large retailers have a lot of tools to fight back against e-tailers:
- Demanding manufacturers to set and enforce Minimal Advertised Price.
- Exclusive products. If Macy's ask for a new product to be theirs only, they usually get their wish granted.
- Geo lockout. Smaller retailers are granted geo-local monopoly.
- Custom SKUs to thwart price lookups and price matches. Samsung makes the same TV in BestBuy SKU, Sears SKU, Costco SKU, generic SKU, and likely others.
- Own ecomerce portals, like Macy's or Nordstrom.
- Local returns and repairs.
And that's not all of it. At our startup we're making many of these tools available to smaller retailers and manufacturers, if you want to join, my email is in profile. In particular we're hot on post-visit engagement workflow, the stuff of the 21st century.
Retail is far from dead. If it were, they wouldn't need the advertising piece in HBR.
- Eridrus 11y agoBesides the local repairs, all of these seem to attempt to stop people from being able to purchase the items you can see in store cheaper online, which makes the assumption that if the shopper can't find the item cheaper online they will purchase it in store. It seems unlikely that a shopper savvy enough to have an item recognition app is going to not know what the online price is for a similar item, even if it's not identical. Consumers obviously assign some value to being able to see the actual item, but it's not clear that the value is as high as you need to sustain a retail operation vs a generous returns policy.