What is Showrooming?
As the trend of online shopping continues to grow and price comparison tools become increasingly available, retailers face a significant challenge known as showrooming. Showrooming refers to the shopping behavior where customers visit physical stores to inspect and test products, only to purchase them later online at a lower price. This trend can lead to lost sales and revenue for retailers and result in a decrease in foot traffic in their physical stores.
Retailers invest in creating an appealing shopping experience and providing customer service, which can be frustrating when customers leave without making a purchase. Customers browse the products in the store, take note of the details, features, and prices, and then search for the same product online to find the best deal.
To combat showrooming, retailers have implemented several strategies. One such strategy is offering price-matching guarantees to ensure that customers get the best deal without having to shop around. Retailers are also offering exclusive in-store promotions that incentivize customers to make purchases in their physical stores.
Personalized service is another approach retailers are taking to combat showrooming. By providing unique experiences and value-added services, retailers can create an omnichannel shopping experience that encourages customers to make purchases in their stores.
How RMPro Rebranding Feature Can Help Prevent Showrooming?
RMPro’s Rebranding feature allows you to replace real vendor’s product information with your own made-up names and codes to hide the true information from your customers or even employees, if you want and applies to Vendor, Collection, Design, and SKU Code. Once you set up to use rebranded values in the Preferences setup, the rebranded information saved for each value will be used instead of real values in customer-facing places across the system, such as tags and customer invoices. However, the original names are still visible in all other places of RMPro.
Rebranding can also be used to prevent salespersons from disclosing sensitive product information to customers. For example, a retailer could mask the Vendor, Collection, Design, or even SKU of a particular product from salespersons to prevent them from sharing this information with customers who may be tempted to leave and look for better deals online.
There are multiple techniques for rebranding. One way may be using abbreviations instead of full product names or descriptions. This approach can make it quite difficult for customers to search for the same product online, as they may not know the exact product name or details. Retailers can also hide certain product information, such as SKU codes, Design, or even the price itself.
Hiding Product Information
The RMPro software even allows you to display certain product information blank if there is no rebranded value defined. It is thus guaranteed that no real product information will be shared.
In cases where Rebranding is enabled, and no brand name is specified for a specific Collection or Design, the field would optionally be left blank or revert to its original value. As soon as the rebranded name is specified for a Collection or Design in the future, the value will reflect the rebranded name.
Search with Rebranded Names
Imagine now you’re interested in looking up items within a customer invoice, or a tag in which no real information is provided. Or, for any reason, you only know the rebranded names rather than the actual values of the item you need to search for. How do you find that item without knowing its real information?
We’ve added an additional tab to the Inventory Inquiry which allows you to search for items by their rebranded values, rather than their real values. Now you can enter one of four rebranded names, or any combination of them when searching for inventory. However, this tab is only visible if the rebranding feature is enabled in RMPro.
A search in the following image, for example, will include all inventory, in which the rebranded vendor is Abyek, and its rebranded Design Code is either KS-40 or KS-42.
Conclusion
Overall, showrooming can pose a significant problem for retailers, but there are several ways to avoid it. Rebranding certain product information can be an effective strategy for preventing customers from leaving physical stores to shop online for better deals. Retailers should carefully weigh the advantages of providing detailed product information against the potential risks and drawbacks of showrooming. Retailers can enhance their competitiveness in the ever-changing retail landscape by implementing these strategies and thus encourage customers to make their purchases in-store.