Here’s a new retailing term for you: showrooming.  According to article by Amy Zimmerman in the Wall Street Journal, showrooming is "when shoppers come into a store to see a product in person, only to buy it from a rival online, frequently at a lower price." Amazon helped boost this trend last December when it encouraged shoppers to scan the bar codes of items they were waiting in line to purchase, then abandon these items after placing an order — often at a lower price — from Amazon.

The proliferation of smart phones has certainly changed the retail scene,  since almost everyone can now take a photo of an item and its bar code. Zimmerman’s article quotes a survey that shows that today half of shoppers who buy products online first checked them out in a traditional store (this statistic is from a recent study of 900 shoppers by Minneapolis-based research firm ClickIQ Inc.).

Bob Greene, in a CNN Opinion article posted online this week, poses the question “Will ‘showrooming’ kill businesses?”* Although he concludes that merchants will continue to open their doors each morning in the hopes that the people who come in will really intend to buy something, his article expresses concern that this trend is just another nail in the coffin of bricks and mortar retail.

How can you prevent your store from becoming a showroom for shoppers who will eventually make their purchase online? The short answer is of course that you can’t, because customers have been coming into stores to examine merchandise in person before ordering online almost since the inception of online shopping.

But you can promote the importance of supporting the local economy by buying from local stores. If you are note part of a Buy Local campaign, you should consider joining one — or starting one in your area — to educate consumers about the issue.

You can work with your vendors to find products that are not offered at a discount online.  Even Target is asking its suppliers to pay attention to the fact that, sending a letter quoted in Greene’s article that states "What we aren’t willing to do is let online-only retailers use our brick-and-mortar stores as a showroom for their products and undercut our prices without making investments, as we do, to proudly display your brands."

And lastly, you can provide customers service that is so stellar that it makes shopping a real pleasure. Remember, the shoppers in line to check out who abandoned their purchases and ordered the same items from Amazon had already made the decision to buy from the store they were in. What prevented them from completing their purchase was the long wait and possibly surly service. That would hopefully never happen in a good independent store.

Happy Retailing,

Carol “Orange” Schroeder