Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: BBY

Waiting for a Better Price Before Purchasing at Best Buy? Now You Don’t Have to – There’s an App for That

December 2, 2010 / / 1 Comment

(Note: This post first appeared earlier today at Minnov8.com.)

Ever been burned buying a consumer electronics product right before a price reduction and wished you’d have waited?  Or, how many times have you been burned and not even known it?  Now there’s a solution for both these problems: it’s called Gazaro Protect.  GazaroLogo-PriceAdj-forBBY Gazaro is a company that’s been developing a cloud-based, realtime retail pricing platform for several years, using artificial intelligence technology, and is focused initially on consumer electronics. Today, it announced its new pricing protection service, including an iPhone app.  Gazaro-iPhoneGrouping

Maybe you’re thinking you missed out on the best prices on Black Friday or Cyber Monday? Well, get this: Gazaro’s research shows average pricing on featured products at Best Buy during the 2009 Holiday Season was actually lower in the week before December 25 than it was on Black Friday or Cyber Monday (see chart).  One in three products dropped in price during the holiday season, with an average price drop of about 15%.  Gazaro says its new service helps you take advantage of these price drops.  BBY-HolidayPriceIndex-700w

 

 

How does it work?  Using either Gazaro’s web site or its new iPhone app, Gazaro Protect lets consumer electronics shoppers lock in the lowest prices by letting them know when a price drops after they buy, so they can then go get money back. It’s a free web service and mobile app that automatically notifies you of these money-saving price adjustments after you buy. The net advantage, Gazaro says, is you get last-minute holiday prices without having to fight the crowds, or risk a product being sold out if you wait too long.

It’s common for retailers to have policies to refund money to shoppers when products they purchase subsequently drop in price.  However, here’s the key: most shoppers don’t collect their price adjustments because of the manual effort to track prices. Of the shoppers surveyed by Gazaro in October 2010, fully 68% did not claim a single price adjustment in the last 12 months. 

The patent-pending Gazaro Protect service saves shoppers money by automatically notifying them of eligible price adjustments on the products they purchase.  In an analysis of 2009 Holiday Season pricing on 120,000 consumer electronics products, including computers, 15% dropped in price by an average of $25.61.  And if you doubt just how many products have price drops, check out this following chart showing just how high the percentages are, at several retailers (Best Buy included). 

As the company points out, saving money is at the top of most shoppers’ minds in our uncertain economy. Check these stats Gazaro provides: 98% of shoppers surveyed stated they’re willing to claim a price adjustment if they’re notified of it, and 94% are willing to claim price adjustments of anything over $10 in value. Prob_PriceDrop_Retailers

Gazaro Protect is free for shoppers, and is available by email, website, and as an iPhone app.  It is initially featuring only Best Buy products, made available through the BBYOpen platform (an open API), with Gazaro promising “increased functionality for shoppers in the near future.”

Here are three sample use-case scenarios the company provided:

• Mobile: Randy buys a digital camera, and scans the product’s bar code or enters the product’s UPC using the Protect iPhone app.  Gazaro registers the product, and automatically tracks the price drops against the store’s price match policy.  Randy returns to the store to get his price adjustment when Gazaro notifies him of a price drop. Notification can be by text message or email.

• Email: David buys a printer at the store’s website, and forwards the receipt to protect@gazaro.com. Gazaro automatically parses the receipt information to register the product, and automatically tracks price drops against the store’s price match policy.  David calls the store to get his price adjustment when Gazaro notifies him of a price drop.

• Web: Jane buys a flat-screen television in the store or online at the store’s website. She copies and pastes the URL or SKU of the product from the store’s website into the Gazaro Protect website. Gazaro registers the product, and automatically tracks price drops against the store’s price match policy.  Jane returns to the store to get her price adjustment when Gazaro notifies her of a price drop.

I spoke with Alexander Rink, Gazaro’s CEO, who said, “Gazaro Protect enables shoppers to buy with peace of mind, locking in low prices by getting money back if prices drop. And it helps retailers by removing shopper doubt at the point of sale, and by creating a positive experience that encourages customer loyalty.”  Rink sees his company’s technology as a natural evolution for retail. “It’s a clear win for shoppers — they will increasingly demand this type of service. They want to know they got a good deal. Traditionally, that’s meant looking for a good deal before they buy — which Gazaro also helps shoppers do at our web site — but Protect extends that to after they buy.”

Rink said that smart retailers are increasingly thinking ahead about converting transactions into relationships, “where they take care of the customer before, during, and after the purchase, and make it easy for them to return for their next purchase. Gazaro is the leading the way in thinking of the whole ‘customer lifecycle’ in this way.”

The Gazaro Protect iPhone app is now available in the App Store, and the company plans an Android app “in the near future.”  GazaroProtectApp The Gazaro Protect web site is free to use for all online and offline shoppers, and online shoppers can also get protected by simply forwarding their store email receipts to protect@gazaro.com — as noted above, for purchases made on BestBuy.com.

“Gazaro stands for honest recommendations to help shoppers get the best value for their money,” said Sam Zaid, Founder and CTO in the company’s news announcement. “Gazaro Protect leverages Gazaro’s cloud-based, real-time Retail Pricing Platform to provide a compelling free service for shoppers, and a customer care differentiator for retailers.”

For more about Gazaro, hit the company’s media page and its blog.  The company says it “enables shoppers to buy with peace of mind by certifying great deals in real-time, and protecting them after the purchase.”  It says it analyzes hundreds of thousands of price points on thousands of computers and electronics products every day, identifying great deals. Its intent is to guide shoppers to smart purchase decisions, and provide retailers with real-time pricing data and analytics.

I requested an interview directly with a manager at BBYopen about Gazaro Protect, but got a curt reply back from the company’s PR department saying it did not want to comment at this time.

Here’s a code for the first 100 people reading this post to get 50% off the price of the “Pro” version of the Gazaro Protect iPhone app: gazaroTSB50. The normal price for an in-app upgrade to Pro is $1.99, so the 50% discount will take that to $0.99. The Pro version unlocks the barcode scanner and gives you unlimited “protects,” while the free version of the app only allows you to protect one product.

(UPDATE 12/3/10: I broke this story when I posted it on Minnov8 yesterday, then several other sites covered it, including CNet, GigaOM, and Lifehacker.  Gazaro now tells me they’ve decided to get more generous. They’re allowing our next 250 readers to upgrade to the Pro version of the Gazaro Protect iPhone app for FREE. Just first download the free version of the app, then upgrade in-app using this code: FREEMONEYTSM.)

Bloggers Break ‘Best Buy Capital’ Story; Company Goes Mum

March 29, 2008 / / 6 Comments

In yet another example of how blogging is changing the news business and the PR business, it’s interesting to go back and look at what happened over the past 10 days or so with a story relating to Best Buy — a company I know well, headquartered right here in suburban Minneapolis. Bestbuylogo
This little tale is instructive to those involved in communications and journalism.

First of all, I think the underlying news story here is a positive one for Best Buy, and for its employees and shareholders. (Full disclosure: I like the company, I have friends there, and I did a little interim gig there myself back in 1999/2000. It is an amazing outfit.) But it’s still interesting to watch big companies like this try to deal (or fail to deal) with the realities of new media.

Here’s the story as it broke locally here in the Twin Cities yesterday (Friday), by our very good Business Journal: Best Buy builds VC unit to find next big things. (More disclosure: I was contacted early in the week by one of the writers of this story to provide reaction to the news, and was quoted in it.) But what’s more interesting to me, even than the news itself, is the fact that it wasn’t first discovered by a traditional media outlet: a blogger had actually broken this story the week before. If you’re in the journalism or PR business and have any sense of the changes being wrought by new media, you of course know such occurrences are becoming more and more common.Bestbuyhq

The Fuse Is Lit
A consumer electronics blogger by the name of Lee Distad in Edmonton blogged this piece of news first on March 18 with this post: Best Buy Capital to Invest in Tech Innovations. He had more to say about it on a weekly recap he did the same day on another blog: Best Buy Opens Their Own Venture Fund. Soon, another blogger, who happens to be a VC (and also a Canuck) — that being Paul Kedrosky of the blog Infectious Greed — had picked up on Distad’s breaking news and posted a link in his own post: Return of Corporate Venture Investors. (A little aside: what he fails to realize, and the others as well, is that Best Buy is not a new corporate venture investor; they’ve been at this game for many years. The new entity appears to signal simply an expansion or formalization of their practice of making minority investments in promising new companies from time to time that are strategic to their business.  The name Best Buy Capital just appears to perhaps be a new name for this entity — though it should not be confused with an old entity called "Best Buy Capital LP," which the company formed in 1994 to raise expansion capital, as this old SEC filing details.)

Then (within minutes, I suspect), the blog TechConfidential (from TheDeal.com) was running a post with an even better headline — With Best Buy Capital, corporate VC goes big box. (Disclosure: I have been invited to be a member of the TechConfidential blogger network, though I did not see their story on Best Buy till this week.) You can see in their post that they included, like good little bloggers, links to the earlier posters, dutifully paying them homage. TheDeal.com exists to serve investors, so you can be sure plenty of people who follow BBY stock got early wind of this story, actually well ahead of the general market. (Did it cause a blip in the share price?  Maybe not all by itself, but I see the stock did trade up that day.  Investors hunger for every little piece of news about the companies whose stocks they hold.)Bbychart0308

Okay, so what’s so interesting about a bunch of bloggers who sniff out a story for their relatively small audiences, which is then broken as a piece of hard news later in Best Buy’s hometown by a large, traditional media weekly that reaches many tens of thousands more people? Nothing so much, since it’s happening a lot these days. What’s interesting to me is that, as Distad reports in his original post, not only could he not get any information or a comment from the company’s PR people — they didn’t even seem to _know_ anything about this particular development within their company! And, as you can see, our local Business Journal was also unable to get a comment from a Best Buy source for their story, a full 11 days after the original blog post.

The Disconnect
If you haven’t picked up yet from one of the links above, here’s how the original blogger discovered the story…are you ready?  From a job posting. That’s right, a little known but valuable source of news that smart people looking for insights about a particular company can often find — right on the company’s own web site! (Or on any of a number of other job boards.) This isn’t news about what’s happening now, mind you. It’s better than that: it’s about what’s coming. Hiring plans definitely qualify as a bellweather of things to come.

So then, what does Best Buy do (ostensibly on a call from the PR people to the HR people) — they take the job posting down! There, that will fix those pesky, nosey outsiders!  Now, those links in the above original blog posts go to a dead page. Not to worry, however — it took me less than a minute to find the job description had been copied and posted to another job listing site here. That’s the thing about the web: once something’s out there, it’s impossible to fully take it back. (This is the posting for a "Principal," whereas another job had been originally posted by Best Buy for the position of "Associate," which I did not search further for. A source of mine within Best Buy told me this week that three people would be hired for Best Buy Capital; I would guess that to be one Principal and two Associates.)

Now, it could be said that this was just a coincidence — that the job postings were removed because the company had suddenly filled all three positions. Hardly likely, since the original posting appears to have only gone up on March 11. (And I know how long things take at Best Buy.) It seems much more likely the company was spooked by a blogger breaking a story that, for some strange reason, they did not want known. Or did not go through "normal channels." (Hint to Best Buy: the world is changing, and, like it or not…channels aren’t normal anymore.)

But what I find the most interesting of all is that the HR people, through their job-posting system (they use the very common Taleo platform), are putting out news that they apparently don’t realize. That is, no one seems to have explained this to them. I’m surmising they don’t tell the PR people when they do post something like this — witness the original blogger running into complete ignorance of the news when he called PR. By the same token, the PR people aren’t trolling the postings regularly themselves, either, it would seem, to become aware of "news" the company may be putting out in ways other than the limited supply they dish out themselves. And limited it is. They, like most big companies of old (and so many overly regulated public firms, I suppose), seem to spend more time keeping the news in than letting it out.

Two things I would ask: (1) Shouldn’t Best Buy (and other companies of their size) start figuring out how to deal with the notion of transparency in our new world of New Media?  And, (2) Doesn’t it seem to you that somebody should get the HR people and the PR talking?

 

 

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