Best Buy

Every November, as retailers dig deep into their bag of tricks, battling each other and their online counterparts for your wallet, the demand for innovation often sparks collaborations with new startups and their novel technologies. For Best Buy, this means partnering with Nashville-based startup eco Interactive, which specializes in "card-linked offers." These are deals tied directly to customers' credit cards through partnerships forged with banks, such as Ally Bank and Fifth Third Bank, two of edo's current collaborators, which consumers can redeem just by swiping said credit cards.

In the latest effort to beat Amazon.com at its game, Target says that for the first time it will match prices that consumers find on identical products at select online competitors this holiday season. Target's CEO Gregg Steinhafel told about 80 reporters at a company media conference Tuesday that the retailers include Amazon, Walmart.com, Bestbuy.com, Toysrus.com and babiesrus.com. Target's bold price match program will run from Nov. 1 through Dec. 16.

Showrooming enabled by the proliferation of smartphones has become the bane of brick-and-mortar retailers. Basically, consumers waltz into a local Best Buy or similar store, find the product they're thinking of buying and check it out. So far so good, from the retailer's perspective. Only then the consumer goes online, sometimes even while standing in the store aisle, to buy it from an e-tailer like Amazon.com. Such behavior is in part responsible for Best Buy's lackluster performance of late. Now retailers are fighting back with their own mobile strategies to best online retailers in this scramble for sales. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that Best Buy is planning to match prices on many items offered by Amazon.com and other online retailers during the holiday shopping season. The move appears to be part of a larger effort from Best Buy to crack down on the number of consumers who scope out products in brick-and-mortar stores and then buy them more cheaply online, a trend known as showrooming. In addition to the expanded price match policy, Best Buy is also said to be introducing free home delivery for products that aren't in stock in stores.

There's been a lot of hype around the battle between physical stores and the online realm. There's the rise of showrooming (i.e., consumers trying out merchandise in-store then going online to buy it), the inability to match prices and a whole plethora of other issues that are seemingly killing brick-and-mortar retailers.

As the tablet wars ratchet up for the holiday season, mass merchants are kicking the competition off the shelf. Wal-Mart is dropping the Amazon Kindle (and all Amazon.com products). That follows Target's spring dismissal of Amazon and its Kindle as the online retailer becomes ever-more competitive. Now, Toys"R"Us, encouraged by the hot-selling children's tablet it sold exclusively last year, is introducing its own branded tablet and ditching Nabi, leaving the next-generation Nabi 2 to be sold by Amazon, Best Buy, Target and Wal-Mart.

comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, released a study on U.S. smartphone shopping behavior based on data from its comScore Mobile Metrix 2.0 service. The study found that four in every five smartphone users — 85.9 million in total — accessed retail content on their device in July. Amazon.com sites led as the top retailer with an audience of 49.6 million visitors, while multichannel retailers including Apple (17.7 million visitors), Wal-Mart (16.3 million visitors), Target (10 million visitors) and Best Buy (7.2 million visitors) also attracted significant mobile audiences.

eBay is entering the territory of mobile shopping app shopkick with the latest update in the e-commerce giant's barcode scanning app, RedLaser. eBay is adding geofencing to its RedLaser application and partnering with Best Buy to allow users to see special offers, browse open-stock items and view items relevant to them right when they step into one of the electronics retailer's 1,100 locations.

Target's customers are looking for answers and connected solutions. Best Buy is looking for new customers, specifically how to reach women and families. So, is the Geek Squad and Target a match made in heaven? Most retail partnering experiments and mergers fail, but the Best Buy Geek Squad in Target might just work. The consumer needs for services in a mobile and highly connected digital world require more than the traditional product-centric merchandising of mass merchants.

Best Buy has tapped Hubert Joly, the former head of global hospitality company Carlson and a turnaround expert, as the nation's largest consumer electronics chain's new CEO and president. The announcement, made Monday, comes after the ailing retailer said Sunday that its offer to advance talks with company co-founder Richard Schulze on his takeover bid was rejected.