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I don't understand why people think price matching is a good experience at all. Do you really think that 10 mins in a chat trying to prove that you found a bet

I don't understand why people think price matching is a good experience at all. Do you really think that 10 mins in a chat trying to prove that you found a better price is a good experience? Same when you're in the store, looking up for the product online in your phone and chasing a floor rep to beg for the price match. Price matching is the biggest marketing illusion I have seen to hide the fact that you're more expensive and less convenient. The ideal customer experience should be always going into a BestBuy trusting that I will get the best possible price from any retailer. Not this scavenger hunt of prices that people claim to be great.

lostcolony 8y ago
Amazon engages in dynamic pricing, meaning prices can shift very frequently (multiple times per day), -and- vary by geographic region. What you are suggesting would require every Best Buy store (or whomever) to, independently, track the pricing they see across every competitor they wish to price match, and update their posted inventory pricing (which requires manual labor to print out a pricing sticker and go put it on the shelf, even if the actual computer system updates automatically). All to reduce their own profit margins. What benefit to them? They can offer price matching, as they do, and everyone who cares about that will take on the chore themselves. Even if they had a brick and mortar competitor who was willing to do that work and that expense (installing digital price displays on every shelf so it could automate updating pricing, and had systems that were polling Amazon every minute, say, and even if they had reason to believe Amazon wouldn't block their IPs because it looks like a DDoS attack), the number of customers who would understand and appreciate what that meant is so low they'd still be massively in the hole. So, yes, that might be the ideal customer experience. It's also undeliverable.
- canada_dry 8y ago
  > dynamic pricing This is one of the (growing) reasons I dislike Amazon. Several times I've found a decent deal that I know a friend or family member would like - sent it to them, only for them to discover (sometimes just minutes later) that the deal has suddenly vanished. On the face of it, Amazon is doing this as a simple function of supply/demand, though it sure could be construed as form of bait-and-switch pricing!
ihuman 8y ago
> Price matching is the biggest marketing vaporwave I have seen to hide the fact that you're more expensive and less convenient. Do you mean vaporware? Vaporwave is a music genre and aesthetic style. Although I'm not sure if vaporware fits into your sentence either; I think shovelware would work better.
- whoisjuan 8y ago
  You're right. I changed the word. :)
danso 8y ago
Amazing that your self-entitlement to having cheapest prices at-all-costs blinds you to the benefits people find in a brick-and-mortar location, such as being able to physically inspect the actual product, before bringing it home within the same hour of purchase.
walterbell 8y ago
> I don't understand why people think price matching is a good experience at all. Some people care about the experience of saving time with: - No Fake Products - same day product Price match is a bonus.
- zelon88 8y ago
  Don't forget about not supporting Amazon. This, for me, is the number one reason why I would price match elsewhere. Amazon could benefit from a little competitive pressure.
heroprotagonist 8y ago
Most of the things I bother with price matching on will require some sort of human interaction in a store to get anyway. Large items, expensive items, etc. It typically takes me less than a minute to validate price on an item like this while in-store and inform the person I'm talking to. Response time from there can vary a bit but at my local MicroCenter it takes them less than a minute to do a quick confirmation of their own, then mark and sign a sticker. That's it. But nobody at any store has ever asked me to beg or made it feel like it's begging to ask for a price-match. Once, those 2 minutes saved me $800 when I was buying two monitors. The $999 MSRP to knocked down to $599 due to a sale at a competitor. There was no negotiation. The sales guy just blinked in surprise for a second when confirming it and said "Yeah, we can match that." To be fair, for this purchase I knew their price and their competitor's before showing up because I checked out their inventory on their website. Yes, it would have been cool if they tracked their competitors' prices and automatically updated their own price (and had employees adjust the corresponding in-store price tags at every store) each time any of their competitors had a sale or lower price. Frankly, though, that burden is not on the store selling the product. They probably would go out of business doing something like that without a huge competitor-matching supply chain behind them that can support universally thin margins. As a consumer, if I want the best possible price then I need to be willing to waggle my thumb across my phone at least a little bit to look for it.
- whoisjuan 8y ago
  Totally. I do it too and also have saved money by price matching things. The backwards thing is that besides all the technical limitation of price tracking that was already discussed in this thread, the ultimate motivation behind strategies like price matching or rebates, is that they give the customer the feeling that they are beating the system, but really is just an extra psychological incentive to get you to purchase something.

lostcolony 8y ago

Amazon engages in dynamic pricing, meaning prices can shift very frequently (multiple times per day), -and- vary by geographic region. What you are suggesting would require every Best Buy store (or whomever) to, independently, track the pricing they see across every competitor they wish to price match, and update their posted inventory pricing (which requires manual labor to print out a pricing sticker and go put it on the shelf, even if the actual computer system updates automatically). All to reduce their own profit margins. What benefit to them? They can offer price matching, as they do, and everyone who cares about that will take on the chore themselves. Even if they had a brick and mortar competitor who was willing to do that work and that expense (installing digital price displays on every shelf so it could automate updating pricing, and had systems that were polling Amazon every minute, say, and even if they had reason to believe Amazon wouldn't block their IPs because it looks like a DDoS attack), the number of customers who would understand and appreciate what that meant is so low they'd still be massively in the hole. So, yes, that might be the ideal customer experience. It's also undeliverable.

canada_dry 8y ago
> dynamic pricing This is one of the (growing) reasons I dislike Amazon. Several times I've found a decent deal that I know a friend or family member would like - sent it to them, only for them to discover (sometimes just minutes later) that the deal has suddenly vanished. On the face of it, Amazon is doing this as a simple function of supply/demand, though it sure could be construed as form of bait-and-switch pricing!

ihuman 8y ago

> Price matching is the biggest marketing vaporwave I have seen to hide the fact that you're more expensive and less convenient. Do you mean vaporware? Vaporwave is a music genre and aesthetic style. Although I'm not sure if vaporware fits into your sentence either; I think shovelware would work better.

whoisjuan 8y ago
You're right. I changed the word. :)

danso 8y ago

Amazing that your self-entitlement to having cheapest prices at-all-costs blinds you to the benefits people find in a brick-and-mortar location, such as being able to physically inspect the actual product, before bringing it home within the same hour of purchase.

walterbell 8y ago

> I don't understand why people think price matching is a good experience at all. Some people care about the experience of saving time with: - No Fake Products - same day product Price match is a bonus.

zelon88 8y ago
Don't forget about not supporting Amazon. This, for me, is the number one reason why I would price match elsewhere. Amazon could benefit from a little competitive pressure.

heroprotagonist 8y ago

Most of the things I bother with price matching on will require some sort of human interaction in a store to get anyway. Large items, expensive items, etc. It typically takes me less than a minute to validate price on an item like this while in-store and inform the person I'm talking to. Response time from there can vary a bit but at my local MicroCenter it takes them less than a minute to do a quick confirmation of their own, then mark and sign a sticker. That's it. But nobody at any store has ever asked me to beg or made it feel like it's begging to ask for a price-match. Once, those 2 minutes saved me $800 when I was buying two monitors. The $999 MSRP to knocked down to $599 due to a sale at a competitor. There was no negotiation. The sales guy just blinked in surprise for a second when confirming it and said "Yeah, we can match that." To be fair, for this purchase I knew their price and their competitor's before showing up because I checked out their inventory on their website. Yes, it would have been cool if they tracked their competitors' prices and automatically updated their own price (and had employees adjust the corresponding in-store price tags at every store) each time any of their competitors had a sale or lower price. Frankly, though, that burden is not on the store selling the product. They probably would go out of business doing something like that without a huge competitor-matching supply chain behind them that can support universally thin margins. As a consumer, if I want the best possible price then I need to be willing to waggle my thumb across my phone at least a little bit to look for it.

whoisjuan 8y ago
Totally. I do it too and also have saved money by price matching things. The backwards thing is that besides all the technical limitation of price tracking that was already discussed in this thread, the ultimate motivation behind strategies like price matching or rebates, is that they give the customer the feeling that they are beating the system, but really is just an extra psychological incentive to get you to purchase something.