Best Buy Confirms 'Secret' Version of its Website

Iberian writes "The Courant site confirms an oft-rumoured possibility: Best Buy does indeed maintain a second website for what one could assume is for the purpose of defrauding its customers. State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ordered the investigation into Best Buy's practices on Feb. 9 after columnist George Gombossy disclosed the website and showed how employees at two Connecticut stores used it to deny customers a $150 discount on a computer advertised on BestBuy.com. Says Gombossy, 'What is more troubling to me, and to some Best Buy customers, is that even when one informs a salesperson of the Internet price, customers have been shown the intranet site, which looks identical to the Internet site, but does not always show the lowest price. [State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal] said that because of the fuzzy responses from Best Buy, he has yet to figure out the real motivation behind the intranet site and whether sales people are encouraged to use it to cheat customers.'"

Comments

Many tricks to price discriminate

[proxima]

Companies will go to great lengths to price discriminate (i.e. sell to different customers at different prices). If intentional, this particularly dirty trick might have the following reasoning: A customer sees a price online, but wants the item more quickly. So the customer heads to the local Best Buy, where the prices are supposed to be the same as what's online (unless specifically marked as an online-only special). By this time, the customer has demonstrated his or her willingness to buy the product and invested the time and energy required to get to the store. At this point it's likely that they are willing to pay more than the online listed price, and buy the item anyway.

Another possibility is just that Best Buy doesn't want to market online prices as "online only" and that people who walk into the store and pay a higher price won't notice unless they look for the same item online (which most presumably don't).

This reminds me of the whole amazon.com pricing PR disaster from a few years back. IIRC, it involved people who were logged in seeing a different price than those who were just surfing casually. By knowing your previous purchasing history, amazon.com could reasonably mark up items it thought you might be willing to pay more for. I don't know what happened to the program, I thought it just went away because of the PR nightmare.

It'd be interesting to know just what's legal and what's not with some of these new tactics. Not all price discrimination is illegal; consider "student" or "senior" discounts, for example. Of course, avoiding a PR mess is probably enough to keep most companies from trying legal but dirty tactics.

Re:Many tricks to price discriminate

[WhiplashII]

It sounds like an open and shut case of bait and switch or false advertising to me.

Those are illegal, and will get you in big trouble with the FTC.

Re:Many tricks to price discriminate

[proxima]

Holy smokes, I never knew that particular incident about Amazon.com.. did it ever make the big news? I'm thinking that something like this should've caused so much consumer anguish / mistrust / lost confidence in Amazon that they would have had lost a lot of business.

Where was the consumer uproar??

A quick Google search turned up this Slashdot article. I didn't realize it was almost 7 years old, though. I read about it here, and amongst people who heard about it, there was definitely some uproar.

Never chalk up to malice...

[fo0bar]

First of all, I didn't know this was a "secret". I've seen it myself. It may have the same color scheme, but it looks noticeably different (no "top 10 tips to buy a new TV" or big flashy mini-ads or any of that crap). The purpose? If a customer wants to buy something that's out of stock or internet-only or something, the employee takes the customer's information and logs in using his employee ID. I've never used this part, but the customer supposedly pays in-store, then the employee puts the confirmation number into the site, and the item is either shipped to the customer or the store.

(CompUSA has a similar site, though in their case the customer (usually business account customers) can access it too -- http://compusabusiness.com/ )

Now, I'm interested in seeing what the result of the investigation is, but this doesn't seem to scream conspiracy. Maybe there was a discrepancy, and the employee pointed to that site because, well, that's the site he always uses. I make a best buy purchase every couple weeks, and always check the site first (mostly because best buy's stock sucks, and I have to figure out which of the 2 stores in town has what I need), and I have never seen a price discrepancy between bestbuy.com and in-store.

so inevitably....

[AnalogueDarkness]

there has to be a comment with an "i work for best buy" in here. well, i do. and it's ironic that this comes up at such a time as today. At work earlier today, I actually saved some customers several hundred dollars by ordering off of our "secret" internal intranet .com site rather than off of the regular internet. The customer in question wanted to order a laptop and have it shipped to a friend in California, and I noted that when i used our Clearwire internet terminal, the price came out to 1,049, but when i used the internal site, it matched our store savings down to 899.99. And the same with another laptop we are running on sale. I'm not sure how well the awareness of this internal site has been spread throughout the company ranks, but at my store at least, we are always up to honor a .com price, and we have non-intranet connected computers on our Verizon Wireless and Clearwire kiosks that allow us (and our customers) to verify a .com price against the internal website.

Better option.

[apparently]

Pay online, and do an in-store pickup.

On-the fly unique email addresses

[whoever57]

You can also use the "+" notation that many mail systems (including gmail) support. What you do is put "+" between the user and @ parts of your email address, for example, if my email address is:

blah@gmail.com

I can also use:

blah+BestBuySucks@gmail.com

This works automatically. No setup is needed for gmail and many other email systems. Unfortunately, a lot of website developers think that "+" is invalid wherever it is used in an email address and will not allow such email addresses in registrations.

Re:The price you see is an *offer price*

[ktappe]

It isn't bait and switch because you're told the higher price before purchase.

It most certainly is bait and switch, as they bait you to the store with a lower price and then present you with a higher price once you're there. It's a textbook example of bait & switch in fact.

Re:My Best Buy service polemic

[ZeroConcept]

You can get the money back on Small Claims Court since:
1) You informed them that the machine won't boot on delivery
2) They agreed to fix it
3) They didn't