Why I no longer fear brick and mortars
I really used to fear brick and mortar retailers - you know, CompUSA, Best Buy, Staples, Office Max, etc. I figured that with their distribution network (all of the retail stores they have scattered across the US) they can satisfy users by offering an online store with an in-store pickup (resulting in more sales to consumers looking for instant gratification).
So today our tech support department bought a HDTV (for testing) from CompUSA. I went to pickup the order (since it was placed on my credit card) two hours after the order was placed. When we placed the order online it said our order would be ready for pickup within 15 minutes - I was pretty blown away.
So I get to the store - they haven’t done anything with our order and I don’t know what they did with the online order we placed (they said that they just throw all that information away and you have to buy the order again in the store). So I had to wait for about 10 minutes for one of their guys to go physically pick my TV up (which I easily could have done) and then go through the whole in-store purchasing process as if I didn’t do anything online.
Then, not missing an opportunity to actually make some money on the sale, they send a sales rep to pressure me into the ridiculously-priced extended warranty. I politely declined. He pushed. I declined again and told him it was for a business and we weren’t interested. He got upset and tried to explain why extended warranties are so important for businesses and finally I just turned around and gave my credit card to the cashier. Eventually the pushy salesmen went away.
So maybe I shouldn’t be so excited - maybe brick and mortars will never figure out the beauty of ecommerce and they’ll keep trying to treat customers like it’s 1980 and making claims that printers don’t really work unless you have a $90 gold-plated printer cable… let’s hope…
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What if you could develop a system that effectively integrates B&M and e-commerce? Our experience at WBD has generated enough revenue to cover basic stocking and non-executive personel fees…
Comment by john — November 10, 2006 @ 1:38 am
well, yeah, that’s the idea behind every major brick and mortar’s ecommerce initiative. i’m just saying that in general they suck at it…
Comment by preston — November 11, 2006 @ 3:39 am
[…] I can’t even believe that CompUSA is touting this 15-minute pickup thing. Check my previous CompUSA post for the truth about their in-store pickup. […]
Pingback by The Preston Blog - An internet marketing blog for internet retailers » Nice one, CompUSA — November 29, 2006 @ 4:16 pm