Each year on the day after my birthday I run out to a series of stores and buy myself a (or several) birthday gift(s). This year, I had one store to hit to get them all: Best Buy.
(I’ll spare you the part of the story where it pains me to shop there in the first place because of how poorly they handled an extended warranty issue I had several years ago – but hey, at least I’m supporting a “local” economy; living in the state where the BB HQ is located. — Also, I chose to buy my music in physical format to get the whole experience complete with packaging, etc.)
On the list this year: 2 Def Leppard CDs, 1 Def Leppard / Taylor Swift DVD and 1 Jennifer Paige CD. Pretty simple. I also was anxious to look for a handful of other CDs that would end up being impulse buys, assuming they’d have them in stock.
However after having to hunt someone down to find ANYTHING on my list I soon realized that most of what I was looking for (all released today) weren’t in stock. With half of what I wanted to purchase in hand, I started up my iPhone, opened the Amazon application and was able to add the remainder of my order to a cart in FAR less time than it took to find it on the shelf.
Then I got to thinking… what does Amazon charge for these CDs? I looked. $21. Best Buy wanted $27.99. So by purchasing my entire order from Amazon, I’d get free shipping AND spend less overall … AND I could place the order from my phone before I even exited the doors of the place I was standing in trying to buy stuff. Free shipping made it a no-brainer and suddenly I found myself saying “hey, I can wait 3 days to GET these CDs because I’m saving a lot of money by doing it.”
So I pressed “purchase” in the Amazon app and my order is now in process.
The lesson? Amazon, who can’t compete with the instant gratification that Best Buy offers via a store, got a $120 order from me because they competed on price, offered free shipping and provided a free iPhone application that worked perfectly and easily. They took away every barrier they possibly could between me and taking an order AND they did it with a user experience that made it easy and exciting (hey, I’m blogging about it after all).
Nice work, Amazon … I really feel like I got a best buy with you.
Tags: amazon, best buy, iphone, user experience
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