A couple of years back, I had the opportunity of meeting someone in the senior management of Best buy. He told me quite frankly that one of his key challenges was that he was afraid Best buy was becoming a showroom for Amazon. In essence what was happening was that customers analyze/examine a product in brick-and-mortar stores and end up buying it online for cheaper. This can be a huge challenge for a specialty retailer in consumer electronics like Best buy which invests heavily in customer-experiential concepts such as geek-squad, only to end up losing business online.
I later discovered that this phenomenon had a word and it was called Showrooming. Showrooming is proving to be costly to multiple brick-and-mortar retailers in recent times with large online giants like Amazon typically profiting from it. The most recent example is that of Target deciding to stop carrying the Amazon Kindle, the reason for which is said to be showrooming. Following Target many mass retailers gave Kindle the boot.
(Image: http://www.forbes.com )
(Image: http://www.forbes.com )
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