Best Buy Confirms 'Secret' Version of its Website

Iberian writes "The Courant site confirms an oft-rumoured possibility: Best Buy does indeed maintain a second website for what one could assume is for the purpose of defrauding its customers. State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ordered the investigation into Best Buy's practices on Feb. 9 after columnist George Gombossy disclosed the website and showed how employees at two Connecticut stores used it to deny customers a $150 discount on a computer advertised on BestBuy.com. Says Gombossy, 'What is more troubling to me, and to some Best Buy customers, is that even when one informs a salesperson of the Internet price, customers have been shown the intranet site, which looks identical to the Internet site, but does not always show the lowest price. [State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal] said that because of the fuzzy responses from Best Buy, he has yet to figure out the real motivation behind the intranet site and whether sales people are encouraged to use it to cheat customers.'"

Many tricks to price discriminate

[proxima]

Companies will go to great lengths to price discriminate (i.e. sell to different customers at different prices). If intentional, this particularly dirty trick might have the following reasoning: A customer sees a price online, but wants the item more quickly. So the customer heads to the local Best Buy, where the prices are supposed to be the same as what's online (unless specifically marked as an online-only special). By this time, the customer has demonstrated his or her willingness to buy the product and invested the time and energy required to get to the store. At this point it's likely that they are willing to pay more than the online listed price, and buy the item anyway.

Another possibility is just that Best Buy doesn't want to market online prices as "online only" and that people who walk into the store and pay a higher price won't notice unless they look for the same item online (which most presumably don't).

This reminds me of the whole amazon.com pricing PR disaster from a few years back. IIRC, it involved people who were logged in seeing a different price than those who were just surfing casually. By knowing your previous purchasing history, amazon.com could reasonably mark up items it thought you might be willing to pay more for. I don't know what happened to the program, I thought it just went away because of the PR nightmare.

It'd be interesting to know just what's legal and what's not with some of these new tactics. Not all price discrimination is illegal; consider "student" or "senior" discounts, for example. Of course, avoiding a PR mess is probably enough to keep most companies from trying legal but dirty tactics.

i remember that...

[Anonymous Coward]

yea used to work in the Big Blue and I remember that... To put a little foot forward for at least my store and me, I figured out that the intranet site listed store prices after the second person complained to me. After that I used one of our laptops with wireless to get onto the internet site.

Honestly, I think it's not a management plan to rip people off, they just like to keep the internet best buy and store best buy separate so when a rep logs onto the computer you see your store's price... and reps' ignorance ends up screwing people over.

Anyway my $.02 to try and throw out some facts and before everyone replies I know it was/is still a bad idea just throwing the facts out as I heard them

Re:Enron 2.0? (references)

[GrEp]

Best Buy to Outsource IT to Accenture [computerworld.com]

  Best Buy reassesses IT Needs [varbusiness.com]

CC doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

This happened to me a year or two ago when I went to buy a digital camera at BB. The camera was cheaper online and when I told the salesman he tried to verify it and it wasn't there. I ended up going across the street to Circuit City which has full internet access...ordered the camera from bestbuy.com with in store pickup, went back to bestbuy and picked it up for that internet price.

Annoying though, and I hope they get a lot of heat for it (was also in CT btw)

Re:Enron 2.0?

[proxima]

Best Buy has a modest contract with Accenture (old Author Anderson) helping them re-design their IT. Coincidence?

Accenture [wikipedia.org] was formerly Andersen Consulting, which split from Arthur Andersen [wikipedia.org] in 1989, and it apparently wasn't exactly a friendly split. To my knowledge, most of the accounting problems regarding Enron and Arthur Andersen happened in the 1990s.

Re:Many tricks to price discriminate

[WhiplashII]

It sounds like an open and shut case of bait and switch [wikipedia.org] or false advertising [wikipedia.org] to me.

Those are illegal, and will get you in big trouble with the FTC.

Re:Interesting, but...

[wile_e_wonka]

I'm not positive, but this seems very similar to me to "bait and switch," which is illegal. In that scheme, the store would advertise an exceptionally low price on an object...but only had 3 in stock. Then, when you come to the store as the 100th person looking for that item, they say, "sorry we ran out... but since you came, we can offer you a "good deal" on this other similar item for only a slightly higher [and much more profitable] price!"

This is similar, except the low price draws customers to the store, and then...where's the low price? That's fraudulant. Also--it's especially bad because it involves deceiving the consumer: "You say you saw a lower price on the internet? Why don't we look at the site right now..." Outright deception is rarely legal.

Re:Many tricks to price discriminate

[proxima]

Holy smokes, I never knew that particular incident about Amazon.com.. did it ever make the big news? I'm thinking that something like this should've caused so much consumer anguish / mistrust / lost confidence in Amazon that they would have had lost a lot of business.

Where was the consumer uproar??

A quick Google search turned up this Slashdot article [slashdot.org]. I didn't realize it was almost 7 years old, though. I read about it here, and amongst people who heard about it, there was definitely some uproar.

Re:Salespeople wouldn't be involved

[hansamurai]

I totally agree with you. BestBuySux.org [bestbuysux.org] is a pretty popular and well known website detailing bad customer experiences as well as the typical ex-employee willing to tell all about their three month "job of hell". I go there every couple months to read up on the latest posts if I'm in need of a laugh (or a cringe) and I don't remember reading about this secret website very much, if at all. Actually, I would bet the very existence of this website keeps Best Buy Corporate from revealing much of anything of what goes behind the scenes to the typical college student selling computers.

Never chalk up to malice...

[fo0bar]

First of all, I didn't know this was a "secret". I've seen it myself. It may have the same color scheme, but it looks noticeably different (no "top 10 tips to buy a new TV" or big flashy mini-ads or any of that crap). The purpose? If a customer wants to buy something that's out of stock or internet-only or something, the employee takes the customer's information and logs in using his employee ID. I've never used this part, but the customer supposedly pays in-store, then the employee puts the confirmation number into the site, and the item is either shipped to the customer or the store.

(CompUSA has a similar site, though in their case the customer (usually business account customers) can access it too -- http://compusabusiness.com/ [compusabusiness.com] )

Now, I'm interested in seeing what the result of the investigation is, but this doesn't seem to scream conspiracy. Maybe there was a discrepancy, and the employee pointed to that site because, well, that's the site he always uses. I make a best buy purchase every couple weeks, and always check the site first (mostly because best buy's stock sucks, and I have to figure out which of the 2 stores in town has what I need), and I have never seen a price discrepancy between bestbuy.com and in-store.

Re:i remember that...

[CodeBuster]

It doesn't even have to be a mock-up of the "real" BestBuy website, especially when one considers that the prices are loaded from the database and displayed dynamically when the pages are served to the browsers. It would not be difficult for the BestBuy.com website to employ the same cloaking [wikipedia.org] techniques used by the search engine optimizers to display one set of content to visitors from the public Internet and a different set of content to visitors from the BestBuy intranet (i.e. in-store computers at any of their locations). There is no need to maintain a completely separate "secret" website.

Re:Many tricks to price discriminate

[penguin_dance]

I thought about Amazon.com too. One thing I have noticed that hasn't changed is that they will change the prices on things left in your cart--sometimes down, but mostly the price goes up. But the price doesn't seem to change in the wish list. It may be just because they don't notify you that the price has changed, but I've got a pretty good memory for what things cost. So what I've been doing is putting items to hold in my wish list and then only moving them over to the cart when I buy them.

One thing that is different from Amazon is that BestBuy is also a bricks and sticks store. And just like any store, one store in California may have too many widgets and so puts the item on sale. Stores in Texas, may have other, different items they want to move. (The fact they ask you to put in your zip code to view the weekly sales list should give you a clue.) And, yes, the price on-line may be different from the one in the store. But if you mention it, they will honor the price in my experience. They should unless it's something you can buy online only--but then it wouldn't be available in the store.

so inevitably....

[AnalogueDarkness]

there has to be a comment with an "i work for best buy" in here. well, i do. and it's ironic that this comes up at such a time as today. At work earlier today, I actually saved some customers several hundred dollars by ordering off of our "secret" internal intranet .com site rather than off of the regular internet. The customer in question wanted to order a laptop and have it shipped to a friend in California, and I noted that when i used our Clearwire internet terminal, the price came out to 1,049, but when i used the internal site, it matched our store savings down to 899.99. And the same with another laptop we are running on sale. I'm not sure how well the awareness of this internal site has been spread throughout the company ranks, but at my store at least, we are always up to honor a .com price, and we have non-intranet connected computers on our Verizon Wireless and Clearwire kiosks that allow us (and our customers) to verify a .com price against the internal website.

Better option.

[apparently]

Pay online, and do an in-store pickup.

Re:Best Buy will Ho out Your Email

[queenb**ch]

Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the doctrine of an agent. If you are paying someone, even if they're doing something they shouldn't be they are still representing your company, both from a customer service perspective and a legal perspective. I don't know how the law works where you are, but here....you are responsible for the actions of your employees while you're paying them. I really doubt that spammers go around testing my domain, which has nothing but an MX record for email addresses. There is no web page or anything else associated with it. If they did, it's an amazing coincidence that two days after I place my order with Best Buy that I start getting spam.

Had he sold out my SSN, Credit Card #, or some other bit of information, he would have likely committed a felony. As it is, he "just" sold out my email address. We're IT people. We handle and process data all the time. We are inherently in positions of trust. If you cannot be trusted, you should not be working. It's not a big leap to go from "just email address" to "just home addresses" to "just credit card #'s." I expect that a responsible and ethical company to have responsible and ethical employees. This person certainly didn't meet either of those criteria. The fact that they chose to keep him tells me that they lack a commitment to ethical behavior and enforcement of standards. You're comments here tell me the same about you.

2 cents,

QueenB.

On-the fly unique email addresses

[whoever57]

You can also use the "+" notation that many mail systems (including gmail) support. What you do is put "+<unique identifier>" between the user and @ parts of your email address, for example, if my email address is:

[e-mail]

I can also use:

[e-mail]

This works automatically. No setup is needed for gmail and many other email systems. Unfortunately, a lot of website developers think that "+" is invalid wherever it is used in an email address and will not allow such email addresses in registrations.

They can't be trying very hard

[sean_ex_machina]

I bought a plasma TV in October when they were doing a zero-interest deal. They rang it up for the store price of $1,739, so I told them that the website was showing $1,619 as the price. The clerk went over to talk to the manager and, sure enough, they gave me the $1,619 price without protest.

A week later the print ad showed the TV at $1,499 and they happily gave me a price adjustment when I asked for one. Fun times.

Re:so inevitably....

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, any kiosk can access the real website if you click "BBY" (the stock link) and then click the Yahoo BBY stock graph. It will bring you to a Yahoo page where you can do a regular Yahoo search. -kevinforgot

Re:On-the fly unique email addresses

[Shatrat]

I've run into at least one registration form lately that would reject any email address with a + in it.
This only works until it becomes widespread, and then the email addresses will not be considered valid or spammers will just truncate the +whatever. Until then, though, you better believe I'm gonna use it.

Re:Interesting Anecdote...

[zippthorne]

You really shouldn't automatically put people on the Do Not Call registry. In the hands of unscrupulous actors, It becomes a call clandestinely list. People should be able to decide for themselves if they'd prefer privacy through legislation or privacy through obscurity.

Re:The price you see is an *offer price*

[ktappe]

It isn't bait and switch because you're told the higher price before purchase.

It most certainly is bait and switch, as they bait you to the store with a lower price and then present you with a higher price once you're there. It's a textbook example of bait & switch in fact.

Re:On-the fly unique email addresses

[Dogtanian]

This sounds like a variant of the service that some ISPs already allow; i.e. if my normal email address was [e-mail], you can give out your email as [e-mail], and the email still gets to you. In this case, the part before the "@" can be anything.

Since dogtanian.randomisp.com isn't likely to be a valid domain, I don't think spammers are as likely to send something via a dictionary attack.

If you want to entirely rule out the possibility that spam to (e.g.) "[e-mail]" wasn't just a coincidental dictionary attack (though I think it unlikely that they'd use the prefix 'bestbuy'), simply choose a number (e.g. 53279) and append it to any address you give out (e.g. [e-mail], [e-mail]). Chances of a spammer choosing that prefix are vanishingly small; any false positives are almost certainly due to you inadvertantly reusing that address when communicating with someone else. Though I'd have said that was the case even without using the number.

Re:Many tricks to price discriminate

[rlthomps-1]

No offense, but that's the point! Handing over my money in exchange for goods at Best Buy shouldn't require reading some tome of rules and conditions. If they were conducting an honest business, they wouldn't be trying to slip in a bunch of "gotchas" in the fine print.

Works Both Ways

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The Intranet version of the BestBuy website is well-known on the DVDTalk bargains forum.
That's because it lists the "in store" prices and there is a whole slew of anime DVDs for which the "in store" price is super-discounted compared to anywhere else, including the extranet version of the same website.

The common link seems to be that these anime dvds are either out of print or nearing out of print status. So even though the "in store" prices are really great, very few stores actually have them in stock. But, BBY's warehouse still has many of them in stock. So to exploit the situation, people have taken to using the in-store kiosks to place orders that are shipped directly from the warehouse to their home. If they were to place the same order using the BBY website from home, the cost would be 3x-4x as much.

For a while there I poked around BBY's DNS and neighboring IP numbers in the hope of finding a way to access the intranet version from the internet and thus skip the trip to the instore kiosk. I don't remember the specifics, but I think we were able to identify the ip address and name of the intranet server (somebody used an in-store system to resolve www.bestbuy.com and compared it to what it resolves to for everyone else on the regular internet), but even though it was pingable, and in the same class-c subnet as the main internet website, it would not accept connections coming in from the regular internet.

Re:My Best Buy service polemic

[ZeroConcept]

You can get the money back on Small Claims Court since:
1) You informed them that the machine won't boot on delivery
2) They agreed to fix it
3) They didn't

Re:I've seen it.

[2cv]

Sorry, printing the online price and bringing it into a Best Buy doesn't cut it. Nobody ever reads the fine print but check out the Conditions of Use link on the bestbuy.com home page.

Pricing Policy
Online prices and selection generally match those in our stores, but may vary. Prices and offers are subject to change.

There are other informative bits as well. Check out the Online and Store Price Guarantees and this bit:

If you are dissatisfied with the Best Buy Web site, its content or Conditions of Use and Legal Notices, you agree that your sole and exclusive remedy is to discontinue using the Best Buy Web site.

The only thing you can bash Best Buy for is not educating their in-store staff on these points. And as witnessed by many posts here, many are doing the 'right' thing (intentionally or not) by telling customers to buy online and use the in-store pickup option.

Disclaimers: I work for the firm that designed the interiors for the Best Buy headquarters. I know people who lived in houses that were since torn down to build the Best Buy headquarters. I shop at Best Buy occasionally. I use bestbuy.com once in a while. I knew people who knew people that used to work at Best Buy. I used to know a person that worked at bestbuy.com but I don't like her anymore.