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Comment by throwaway201103 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway201103

This is nothing new. In the 1980s I was into photography. The local camera shop sales guys were always complaining about the people who would come in, spend hours talking about and looking at gear, and then they would leave and order it from 47th Street Photo, or Adorama, or one of the other NYC mail order sellers.

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I'd like to see some of the stores become actual showrooms.

You go in, get to handle the actual product. Then, if you decide to buy, do it there via the stores affiliate link. If not, you pay the store $N on your way out.

That way the customer gets the price they want, and the store makes some money for letting them handle things.

Also, I'd happily pay the store to deal with any warranty issues. I just talk to the person of the store (whom I paid for that service), and they communicate with whoever they need to get the issue solved. In the meantime, they give me a replacement item. This service should be offered, at a higher price tag, even if I bought my product elsewhere, no questions asked.

This sounds a lot like the Apple physical stores - they'll sell and service any gear made by Apple.

Also helps that Apple is vertically integrated and has tight control over it's supply chain and applies MAP very uniformly.

> If not, you pay the store $N on your way out.

I was thinking the same as I scanned down this thread, but I can't get past two things: 1) It's tough to for me (the customer) to have enough confidence that the showroom has all the options I should consider, and that the showroom employees are knowledgeable about them all. Without that, it's tough to commit to a flat price for browsing before I enter. 2) I can't see how this happens one store at a time. As long as there are traditional retail locations nearby, ones that let customers browse for free, customers will gravitate there. Can this business model succeed only once traditional brick and mortar retail has disappeared?

The new version of this is the customer-centric return policy. Because there's no place to go and see several different products, shoppers just order them all online, and return the ones they don't want.

It's interesting. The online marketplace (Amazon) controls the return policy, but the sellers control the pricing. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Unfortunately, it's distorted (particularly in the case of Amazon) by the proliferation of fake brands. And by fake brands, I do not mean fakes of well-known brands...I mean meaningless brands that do not exist, that attempt to create product differentiation that does not exist.

It's turned Amazon into the crap-pile of last resort, for me.

True. Although in retrospect, I see a lot of those local stores as having a limited inventory of gear and all the incentive in the world to push that inventory. While I have a special place in my heart for things like indie bookstores, homebrew suppliers, etc. a lot of small local specialty shops really weren't all that great.

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