Wal-Mart and Best Buy face the same problems.
1, “Try at store, buy online.” Both Wal-Mart and Best Buy face this problem after online shopping becomes popular by the improvement of network technique. It’s hard to judge an item is good or not just read the description online. Therefore, customers will go to Best Buy or Wal-Mart to try at store and buy the same type at Newegg or Amazon, which offer a low price online. Wal-Mart and Best Buy become an offline store for these online retailers for free.
2, Tax and delivery. Wal-Mart and Best Buy have traditional consumption/state sales taxes whatever online or offline operation. Their online competitors, such as Amazon and eBay, are more flexible on this topic. It makes Wal-Mart and Best Buy couldn’t offer a best price for customers after taxed. Delivery is also a problem for both of them. Amazon has delivery centers to help them keep deliver time and operation cost while Wal-Mart and Best Buy have to outsourcing most of its delivery service to other companies and hard to lower the cost in this process. The cost will transfer into the total price after all.
3, Wal-Mart and Best Buy don’t know how to deal customers’ demands. Wal-Mart and Best Buy have huge data related about customers’ purchasing history, but they seems don’t know how to deal with these data. In another word, they have no idea to dig something from their data. Another reason that they couldn’t use this data efficiently is lack of channel. As I talked before, both Wal-Mart and Best Buy don’t have a good online channel to put notification and advertisement. Even know customers’ demands, they may do not know how to catch these guys to read their new “leaflet”. The result is the generation of online shopping will be the market share of their competitors, Amazon and eBay, who really good at online marketing by internet tech.