Retail Pricing and Fear

The development of mobile computing is radically changing the retailing industry. The following article is excellent in describing how pricing is becoming more transparent because of cell phone use and new apps:

Bustillo, Miguel, Zimmerman, Ann, 2010. Phone wielding shoppers strike fear into retailers. The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 15.

Below is an amazing statistic given that various crowd sourcing mobile phone apps are only recently available:

"'The retailer's advantage has been eroded,' says Greg Girard of consultancy IDC Retail Insights, which recently found that roughly 45% of customers with smartphones had used them to perform due diligence on a store's prices. 'The fourwalls of the store have become porous.'"

The combination of e-commerce and price checking apps will change the essential nature and structure of the retail industry!

Market leaders have been established:

"TheFind app has been out for four weeks and has been downloaded 400,000 times, according to the company. RedLaser, an app that allows shoppers to use mobile-phone cameras to scan bar codes to compare products and prices, has now been downloaded six million times since it was introduced in May 2009, says parent eBay Inc."

This is a previous blog post that might be of interest:

Scandit - Social Shopping App for the iPhone

The very nature of customer service will change as the following quote indicates:

"The shift in consumer behavior also imperils some of the most lucrative aspects of selling in stores, such as the ability to use salespeople to lure customers into making impulse buys, or entice them to buy one thing after they came in for another. A 10-country study by management consultant Accenture this year found that 73% of mobile-powered shoppers preferred peering into their phones for basic assistance over talking to a retail clerk."

Traditionally, customer service has been an important part of the marketing mix. Technology is changing customer service!

I did the following presentation in 2002, which foretold the power of using information and technology as part of customer service:

The New Era of Customer Service Management

This is an exciting area and there is much potential to change traditional business practices.