Smart phone price comparison software challenges retailer marketing strategy

Introduction: Foreign Thursday author said, more and more smartphone users began to use price-comparison applications to find affordable goods.　　This trend marks a further blurring of the line between online shopping and physical retailing, which is a great impact on the pricing strategy of retailers, but it also brings new opportunities for marketing. The following is the full text: Price contrast application Tri Tang (Tri Tang), a 25-year-old marketing practitioner, went to the Best Buy store in Sunnyvale, Calif., last weekend to purchase gifts for his girlfriend. If it was last year, Tang would probably put the 184.85-dollar Garmin GPS directly into the shopping cart, but this year, he pulled out his own Android phone and entered the Garmin product number into a thefind application, And through the application immediately connected to compare the product in Best Buy price and at other retailers price.　　Tang found that the Amazon site with the same product does not include shipping and tax prices for only 106.75 U.S. dollars, so on the spot on the site under the Amazon order.　　Tang said the price-comparison software, called TheFind, was quite practical and was his new shopping partner, relying on the software to ensure the best price.　　Tang's application of smartphones suggests that retailing is facing a revolution – as Wal-Mart's CEO, Mike Duke, calls it "a new era of price transparency", which could lead to the end of the existing business model for large US retail chains.　　The retailer's existing business model assumes that as long as consumers are attracted to the store through special bargains, they can persuade consumers to buy products with relatively high margins.　　Now, retailers have to deal with smart-phone users, and with smartphones, consumers can confirm whether bargains are really special and whether prices are reasonable.　　Greg Girard, of IDC, retail insights, the IT and telecoms industry market consultancy, said that 45% of consumers with smartphones were conducting market research via smartphones, and that the retailer's dominance had been eroded. Commodity sellers, such as electrical appliances, are among the most affected by consumer-market research.　　Best Buy, America's biggest electronics chain, said in Tuesday that its market share has fallen further this year, with some analysts using price comparison software as one reason for the downward trend.　　Smart-phone fans like Don are still a small audience among consumers, and whether mainstream American consumers are willing to spend extra time using mobile programs to compare commodity prices is not yet clear; some consumers may only want to use the technology when buying special or expensive goods.　　Even so, the retail chain is increasingly worried about the bargaining power of mobile-phone users, in part because the number of such users is growing rapidly. Data from IBM's Coremetrics, an E-commerce analyst, showed that in Friday of last year's Thanksgiving, consumers using mobile devices to access the retailer's website accounted for only0.1% of visitors to the site, and this year, the proportion of such consumers has reached 5.6%, an increase of more than 50 times times.　　E-commerce experts predict that the number of users of the shopping software will increase rapidly, mainly driven by the increase in the number of smartphone users in the United States. Multiple mobile-phone shopping apps are already available on Apple's itunes download, and developers are ramping up more programs to turn smartphones into shopping tools.　　Many of these programs require only customers to take a barcode or QR code from a mobile phone camera, or to enter a product name in voice. The data from the TheFind website shows that the TheFind application has been available for only four weeks and has been downloaded 400,000 times.　　And ebay's data show that its development redlaser since May 2009, the cumulative number of downloads has reached 6 million times, through this software, the user can use mobile phone camera scanning commodity barcode for price comparison. Explore new strategies while retailers ' management has publicly expressed support for price transparency, retail experts say not all chains can withstand the grim test of the price of mobile phone users.　　Some retailers need to explore new ways to survive. Nem Palanski Noam, senior manager of the Jasmine Consultancy (Kurt Salmon Associates), said the mobile price comparison process would speed up the process of eliminating the market for retailers that lacked price competitiveness, shop-level shopping experience, and were not outstanding.　　, consumers ' cautious consumption habits due to the weakness of the economy have made them inclined to buy the cheapest goods they can find, and the popularity of smartphone prices is making it harder for retailers to implement higher-than-site prices in physical stores.　　Laura Conrad, the pricegrabber.com president of the comparison shopping website, said that the era of differential pricing between stores and shops had passed; Although the physical shop cost is high, the line between shopping online and physical shopping has become increasingly blurred.　　This week, Best Buy and Connecticut State, the attorney general, reached a settlement in a lawsuit alleging that Best Buy's goods were priced at higher prices than consumers could see on the Internet. Changes in consumer behavior are also a blow to retailers ' store-marketing capabilities, such as directing consumers to impulse spending through marketers, or attracting consumers to buy another item after buying a product.　　A study conducted in 10 countries this year by Accenture, a consultancy, found that 73% of mobile phone users tend to get basic commodity information through mobile phones rather than salespeople. Mary Sanders (Mary Saunders) is the mother of two children. For her, a mobile phone is a tool for handling the most affordable choices in two of items.　　During a recent purchase of Christmas gifts at a physical store, Sanders saved a lot of money by using his iphone to scan the barcode on his shopping list. Although Saunders is still collecting special offers through newspaper flyers and shopping outlets, mobile apps have increasedShe found the best offer of confidence.　　She said she was keen on finding the most affordable goods, and that the barcode scanner program was the coolest thing in the world for her.　　Opportunities and challenges e-commerce experts say the popularity of the mobile-phone price comparison program poses both challenges and opportunities for retailers: retailers can use them as marketing targets when consumers are still in their competitors ' stores. Best Buy now has a partnership with TheFind, and when the program finds that consumers are located in rival stores such as Wal-Mart, it sends custom marketing messages to them. For example, when a consumer uses a thefind program to compare TV prices in a Wal-Mart store, it displays the approximate product information of Best Buy based on a consumer search record, similar to the way a shopping site sends custom marketing information to a consumer search record.　　Although the type of Best Buy is not always the same, the offer may not always be better, but it offers a chance to compete.　　While such marketing messages are sent only to consumers who allow thefind programs to be positioned through the mobile global Positioning system, some consumers still feel their privacy is violated.　　Barry Judge, Best Buy Marketing director Bally Zachi, said the partnership with TheFind had made Best Buy a chance to seize the deal at a critical moment when consumers made the decision, and that the power of the mobile program was so powerful that it was necessary for retailers to adapt aggressively and quickly to the new trend.　　In addition, if consumers find more affordable quotes elsewhere through the thefind process, best buys will send other product information from the store to the bottom of the market. TheFind chief Executive Sevis Kuma (Siva Kumar) said that the retailer's marketing strategy can be summed up, rather than watching consumers out of the store, rather than tell consumers, since has come to the store, there are always goods worth buying; mobile apps not only bring convenience to consumers,　　Retailers can also make them available for their own use. At the moment, Best Buy's non-minimum price refund guarantee is valid only for competitors in the vicinity of the store's print ads, not covered by the mobile phone price comparison program to get the results of the search.　　Zaki acknowledges that this policy may need to be adjusted in the future. Gibu Thomas, Wal-Mart's senior vice president for E-commerce, said Gibb Thomas has developed a strategy to deal with mobile phone sales.　　Wal-Mart does not believe that the mobile price comparison program poses a threat to its parity model. Internet retailers compete for the market share of physical retailers by developing mobile apps.　　Amazon last month unveiled a new mobile phone price comparison program that iphone users can use to scan barcodes, take photos of shelves and voice input, and compare physical retailer prices to Amazon's equivalents. Sam Hall, head of Amazon's mobile phone business, says it wants to provide customers with access to information about Amazon products anytime, anywhere, SamImprove consumer confidence in their own buying decisions. (Mara)