Announced on Best Buy’s site earlier this week, management at Best Buy has made the decision to price match a collection of online competitors starting during early March 2013. The revised version of Best Buy’s Low Price Guarantee is designed to quell the trend of “showrooming,” an act in which consumers preview consumer electronics within retail outlets before purchasing the item online at a lower price point from a different retailer. For instance, when Target carried the Amazon Kindle, consumers would demo the device within Target and purchase a Kindle eReader or tablet on Amazon. This was part of the reason Target stopped carrying the Amazon Kindle during May 2012.
The online retailers listed in the new policy include Apple, Amazon, B&H Photo, Circuit City, CompUSA, Crutchfield, Dell, h.h. gregg, HP, Home Depot, Lowes, Newegg, Office Depot, Office Max, Rakuten (formally Buy.com), Sears, Staples, Target, TigerDirect and Walmart.
However, Best Buy will not price match products offered by third party vendors on retailers like Amazon. Best Buy also won’t price match products during exchanges or returns. In order to successfully match a price on a specific product, customers will need to supply the URL of the retailer’s site and Best Buy employees will verify the price.
Best Buy has been testing this new policy on a variety of qualified products since the start of the new year. In addition to retail stores, customers will be able to take advantage of the new policy on BestBuy.com. Beyond the permanent change in the price matching policy, Best Buy is also decreasing the period in which customers can return an item from thirty to fifteen days according to Bloomberg. Customers that want to take advantage of online price matching for price adjustments will need to visit a store prior to the 15-day expiration date. However, Best Buy will continue the policy of not charging restocking fees on returned merchandise.
Just bought NBA 2k13 at Best Buy about a week ago, they price matched Amazon for the $20 off. And yes, he even looked it up on his computer with no problems, no fingers being pointed, nothing needed to be printed out. Best Buy is sinking but they arent all bad.
Good for them. They need to put Fry’s on the price matching list.
Best Buy should have done that a long time ago….
what if you have it on your smart phone? Time for the backlash to corporate and blogs.. let them hear you if they don’t match
They suck , you have to print up price from online retailer , cuz they won’t let you look at screen and basically call you a liar .
I’ll just buy on-line, Best Buy can sink.
Good. Because Best Buys sucks. And they are very expensive.
American TV has been doing that for years
There’s a serious problem with what is considered a “Third party retailer” – is that people who sell via Amazon Marketplace, or anyone who is not Amazon? Personally my rule of thumb is fulfillment – if Amazon fulfills it, it’s Amazon’s, even if another company is making the deal.
Maybe i’m just crazy, but flash sales from “fulfilled by Amazon” companies show up all the time and disappear just as fast as they appear. It’d be hard to kind of get local retailers to play that ballgame just from a logistics perspective.
I was thinking the same thing. Half of the 3rd party retailers on Amazon feel fake to me for some reason. Or there are a lot that sell used products.
You have to think that most people wanting Best Buy to do a price match online will point to Amazon.
I think what this is doing at the end of the day is accounting for most price match scenarios. The flash sales for the super frugal are not even what Best Buy wants anyway – they want the average joe who sees it for $10 less online, as well as the even more average joe who will pay the sticker price in store.
Either way, it comes down to how patient (or impatient) you are for shipping. I think that’s what Amazon has done most effectively with prime. As someone who lives on a campus – it’s actually more convenient to buy online with Prime than to go to the nearest big box mart.
True many will point to Amazon, BUT what the customer will fail to know is that it’s only for specific Amazon sellers.
it’s hard sometimes to even get t hem to match the local stores…
Heck – back when they were running two identical websites (one you could access at home, one that their in-store computers accessed) it was hard to get them to price-match their own posted prices.
I blogged about my challenges with price matching at Best Buy: http://thoughtindustry.com/2012/11/24/dispelling-the-showrooming-myth/