Phone Apps and Black Friday….retailers warming up.

This year most major retailers have started to warm to the notion that shoppers enter their brick and mortar sanctuaries with their smart phones in hand ready to cross-reference every conceivable retailer’s price. Prior to Black Friday of 2011, some retailers went as far as to ban cell phone use in their showrooms! The fear was that cell phone users would “showroom” for the exact product they needed, then order it at a lesser price online. According to the Future of Retail Alliance, (FORA), over 40 million smartphone and tablet users will be using some type of shopping app this year.

According to the retail consulting firm Kantar, Wal-Mart prices both online and in-store were on average 20% lower than Amazon. Retailers have grown accustomed to the challenge of online retailers and have adopted several strategies to snag the supposed “showroom” shopper.  Retailers are now taking advantage of in-house customers by participating in aggressive price-matching policies as well as ship to store and other strategies.

When we released our first client-server application that batched phone numbers and sent messages to pagers, I was surprised to learn what crafty competitors were doing. They would pay a caregiver to hold a pager and then pass on all open needs to compete for the opening! I remember the long slow wait as call after call would leave the PC, pass through the modem, then send a string of characters to the end-user’s pager, one at a time! Thank goodness times have changed, and technologically for the better!