They have included a bunch of unique, forward-thinking features with Fire, but one that I'm interested in at this very moment is the ability to recognized real world products and find them on Amazon in seconds.
What does this mean for brick-and-mortar retail stores? How can they win this battle against showrooming?
How Retail Stores Can Beat Showrooming
They can't.
What Retail Stores Should Do About Showrooming
A man walks into a store, sees something he likes and buys it. This is the retail store process put simply, with showrooming or not. The only difference is how he buys it.
He looks online to see if it's selling for a lower price, and if it is he buys it there.
He has a date or a meeting and doesn't want to schlep something around, so he finds it online and gets it delivered to his door.
He doesn't want to carry it, so he finds it online and gets it delivered to his door.
He looks online and sees it's selling for the same price, but will take two days to get there and he wants it now, he's on his way home or has a car with him, he buys it at the store.
In some rearrangement of the above scenarios lies the secret to dealing with showrooming. As long as you have a retail store, showrooming will happen, there's no stopping it. So you can join it.
Do some showrooming yourself of your own store and get rid of the stuff that you can get online and for cheaper. What you can offer that can't be found online? Sell your shit online, on amazon so when people shop there, they're still buying from you. Offer some of the same services that shopping online offers, like delivering to people's homes and comparison shopping.
For bigger brands that can't just get rid of their retail store offerings if it's sold online, don't get rid of things, but add unique items to brick and mortar. For bigger stores that sell wildly accessible items, like books, Levi's or detergent — get smart with location recognition and be preemptive. Give your walk-in customers a prompt to compare prices and shop on their phones in YOUR app or mobile web.
That's all I have to offer now.
