BrainTrust Query: Amazon Showrooming - Reasons Your Retail Store is Susceptible
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of an article from The Retail Doctor's blog.
Showrooming occurs when customers, after having physically touched, smelled, lifted, handled and, most importantly, priced your products in person, go online through their smartphones and comparison shop — most often with Amazon.
Customers walking into your store no longer are "just looking," they're taking your hard-earned retail reputation, using all the beautiful displays, premium products and employees to cancel out any suspicions they have before they buy online.
To shoppers, it's smart shopping.
To cellular companies it is the reason they can sell the more expensive smartphones.
To Amazon, it's just business.
So how does your store open the door for them to go to Amazon or other online retailers in the first place? Here are a few ways stores become susceptible to showrooming:
- Your merchandise is stacked and displayed like everyone else's. When the merchandise is seen as nothing special, online sites beckon.
- You don't have enough employees. When it's tough to find someone to answer your questions, the customer's smartphone is always-at-the-ready for a quick Amazon price check.
- The employees you have take too much time with one customer. It's great to have technically proficient employees whose passion is knowing every nuance and who can regale the customer with story after story, but like a restaurant, your selling floor needs to turn customers regularly.
- The employees you have take too little time with customers. Employees who say, "It's over there," or "I'll get someone" might as well say, "Find it yourself." When there's no relationship, there's no loyalty to shop with your brick and mortar store.
Your shopping experience is unremarkable. If a customer gets the silent treatment and is only spoken to at the cash wrap, they don't get a good feeling from their purchase. - You let customers help themselves with self-service. If you designed the store for customers to feel free to help themselves, they will now feel free to help themselves ... with their smartphones.
- You have an owner or stockholder who doesn't want to lose any business. They want you to offer whatever discount it takes to keep all customers. The best merchants know you have to walk away from unprofitable customers in order to remain profitable.
- Customers assume everything online is the same as yours. Unless your employee shows the value of the real thing in your store, customers might be misled to buy something online at a lower price that could be counterfeit, damaged or mismatched. If your employees aren't trained to poke holes in online shopping habits, customers may purchase apples when they wanted oranges.