Price Comparison Mobile Apps – an opportunity for B&M Stores?

There are a number of apps (Twenga, RedLaser, Save Benjis and others) for performing on-the-go price comparisons.

You either search by product name or barcode, but the pitch for them all is the same: you’re out shopping, in a bricks & mortar retail store when you see a product you want. You take out your iPhone, scan the barcode or type in a product name and check the price, either directly with online stores like Amazon or using Google Products.

The developers of the apps sell them cheaply, the real revenue is in the affiliate commissions to be earned.

Whenever a technology comes that tips the balance unfairly (away from the bricks and mortar store which are being turned into a free showroom for online merchants) there are a number of ways for the ‘wronged party’ to handle the threat.

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New Bargain Higher Price

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Lilek is aubergine/eggplant, in case you were wondering. Telling you the old lower price (29.90Kc) is an interesting approach. Maybe someone’s POS labelling software is buggy.

Price Discrimination in the clear

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There’s something about this ad that strikes me as just plain wrong.

It’s a billboard at Prague airport, in English, offering up to 49% off local Czech prices if you’re in the military, a diplomat or just an expat working abroad. Quite how your average Czech Volvo customer feels about what appears to be some pretty extreme price discrimination I couldn’t say. Wouldn’t amuse me much though.

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(Pricing) confusion reigns supreme?

I came across these signs a couple of days ago and it brought to mind one of my persistent bêtes noires: confusion pricing as a marketing tactic. Anything from presenting your lowest possible price, after quantity discount, or of the least popular option (online retailers and market traders do this all the time), or making your pricing structure so confusing that customers can’t make an apples-to-apples comparison (mobile phone companies).

I don’t recall a section in The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing that said you should aim to bamboozle and confound your customers, yet this must work simply because if it didn’t, companies wouldn’t do it.

Dealing first with bait-and-switch pricing – see the first image – with the ‘from’ in small print. There’s one colour available for 99p (yellow), everything else is £1.99. They could advertise a price of 99p to £1.99 – literally the least and most you will pay for a scarf. In fact this sign was an improvement on another store, they didn’t have the helpful information as to which colour you could have for 99p, surely leading to frustrated shoppers hunting for the promised bargain. The same store also had this large sign advertising 89 colours available inside. All the other signs mention price, the large numeral ‘89′ looks at first glance like a price. When there are multiple places selling the same things along the street, the 89 might stand out, bring someone in, then an aggressive salesperson can close the pitch. I guess this isn’t really any worse than the case quoted in Reality Check of the independent hardware store owner who dealt with the opening of a massive competitor next door by changing his store sign to ‘Main Entrance’. It makes me question how this sort of approach makes the shopper feel, is ‘misled’ a good feeling to inspire?

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