At the end of my blog post titled Retail Is Still Barking Up The Wrong Tree Against Ecommerce, I’d made a bold prediction that, within a few months, I’d find a few more non-price related reasons for shopping online.
Well, it took me longer than that but I found one recently.
This was at the outlet of a chain store where I’d gone to buy a toaster.
I entered the store, picked up the toaster and reached the checkout.
The Cashier was missing. Apparently he’d gone to the backoffice to figure out how to bill a certain item in the shopping basket of the customer ahead of me.
The queue was standstill for more than a minute. I decided to give “showrooming” a try.
For the uninitiated, showrooming is a type of omnichannel shopping where you visit a store but place the order online. You can find more on this increasingly popular shopping trend in my blog posts entitled How Can Organized Retailers Respond To Showrooming? and Stores Have Themselves To Blame For ‘Showrooming’.
I fired up go-to showrooming app RedLaser. It didn’t list the product.
I then tried Scandid, my other favorite app in this category. As soon as I scanned the barcode on the toaster’s box, Scandid displayed many cheaper sources for the same product, one of which was Amazon India. Since Amazon is my go-to online store, I went ahead immediately. I tapped the BUY button on Scandid, went to the Amazon mobile website – I haven’t bothered to install its native Android app – and placed the order with a few more taps.
Mission accomplished!
Just as I was about to leave the checkout bay, the cashier returned to the till.
I told him how close he was to getting my business but lost it by going AWOL. He didn’t seem to care.
I wasn’t surprised. After all, his employer belongs to a business group that’s better known for philanthropy and employee welfare than Customer Experience or Maximization of Shareholder Value.
Interestingly, the store lost the sale to Amazon, which is known for its diametrically opposite approach.
Does Amazon's work culture show that you can't both mollycoddle employees & delight customers at the same time? http://t.co/8s81Gpi7Qy?
— Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) August 27, 2015
Although ecommerce hadn’t even crossed my mind for this purchase, the brick-and-mortar store pushed me online with its sloppy checkout process.
Which is one more reason unrelated to price for people shopping online.
