Amazon price-matching app causes concern for bricks and mortar

Amazon has been running a promotion with a new smartphone-based price-checking tool that lets users scan the barcodes of items in stores and compare the prices to items Amazon sells to earn 5% store store credit per item for up to three items (excluding books).

Amazon has been coming in for a bit of criticism for the promotion, given that it is trying to pull even more dollars away from brick and mortar retailers at the time of year when they make the greatest amount of sales. Author Richard Russo has a fairly long opinion piece on this in the New York Times in which he takes aim at Amazon’s promotion as being aimed expressly at stealing money from bookstores. (As far as I know, it’s actually aimed at brick and mortar stores in general, including Walmart, Best Buy, and so on.)

At least some of the people Russo talked to about it seemed to recognize this fact, and couched their response in those general terms:

[Authors Guild president] Scott [Turow] supplied lawyerly perspective: “The law has long been clear that stores do not invite the public in for all purposes. A retailer is not expected to serve as a warming station for the homeless or a site for band practice. So it’s worth wondering whether it’s lawful for Amazon to encourage people to enter a store for the purpose of gathering pricing information for Amazon and buying from the Internet giant, rather than the retailer. Lawful or not, it’s an example of Amazon’s bare-knuckles approach.”

But others seemed to take this as yet another example of Amazon’s war on the bookstore, and decried Amazon taking advantage of their investment of money and effort by treating their bookstore as a showroom for web-order goods.

Something that I find amusing about the whole thing is that everyone seems to be acting as if Amazon invented the idea of smartphone comparison shopping. But smartphone apps and other pricematch services have been around for several years now. (Here’s a piece about one such app, Mobiletag, from last year, and one about cell phone comparison shopping from 2009.)

I used to use Frucall, which launched all the way back in 2006 (it apparently went under sometime within the last couple of years), to save me a lot of money on my shopping with my non-smartphone. The way it went was that I would text the UPC number of an item to Frucall, Frucall would tell me I could get it more cheaply online, so I would forego buying it at the store…and then by the time I got home to where I could buy it online, I would inevitably have forgotten that I even wanted it to begin with. (See? Money saved!)

Perhaps the difference is that the other services were just services to find prices at other stores, rather than one launched by an on-line store itself. But I still remember reading in years past an article that stated some retailers were outright trying to prevent people from using smartphones to comparison shop in their locations—so it’s not as if it’s a new worry for them.

When you get right down to it, Amazon’s price-matching app is really just a symptom of the larger trend toward doing more shopping online rather than in person, especially at this busy time of year. I know my parents are delighted that they can do most of their shopping via Amazon and not have to venture out amid the hustle and bustle of holiday shopping. And perhaps the retailers should actually be glad those people are even venturing out to where they might buy something from them. It at least shows that they’re in the market for physical goods, rather than staying at home and buying e-books.

Honestly, who enjoys dealing with holiday crowds and traffic? People had put up with it until the last few years because it was the only game in town. But when you offer someone an alternative, it’s not surprising that they’re going to take it. Perhaps these retailers should try to figure out a way to make themselves more attractive to consumers who at least bother to comparison-shop in them, so that they’ll be willing to buy it in person even if they can get a better price online. They at least have the chance to interact with those people; they may never meet the ones who do all their shopping from their keyboards at all.