As retailers gear up to bring shoppers into their stores for the Black Friday sales this year, online merchants are also arming themselves for their own selling strategy, which will include a range of deals that are available only to online consumers, geared toward people stuck in long lineups.
Amazon’s Sam Hall has been encouraging shoppers to use their smartphone’s price check app to make sure that they’re always betting the best deals.
Gilt Groupe, which usually starts its multi-site sales at noon, has announced that it will begin its mobile exclusives at 6am, right at the time that shoppers are expecting to start flooding the stores (and their checkout lines) at some of Gilt Groupe’s high end competition.
According to the president of Gilt Group, Andy Page, “We haven’t had the ability to compete effectively with Black Friday, and now we do.” Page went on to forecast that this in-store shopper poaching technique will allow the company to achieve the best Black Friday in its history.
Some of the most aggressive promotions of this nature have been developed by Amazon, Gilt, and HSN, as well as other online companies that want to swoop in and take their part of the traditional retailing frenzy that comes with the Friday following Thanksgiving – the year’s single most busy shopping day.
A few traditional companies are already preparing to fight back. Best Buy, for example, which is already familiar with the harm that can be caused by online price-comparison apps has decided against displaying standard barcodes on some of their products, making them more challenging to scan by smartphone apps.
