Not at all true in this case. They set their prices which are tagged and equivalent to almost everyone else, but if you find a better deal online, whether it's a sale or promotion they will match the price. How is that a bad thing? If you're in their shoes and someone is sitting in the store looking at a product and at the same time checking their phone online (where items and current prices are perfectly cataloged by Google revealing who has the lowest price in a matter of seconds) I would much rather capture that sale, even at a diminished profit knowing I can restock.
Sure, it makes sense if you're the shop. You capture the sale at the highest profit you can.
But, I agree with
@BRT. I generally don't patronize price-matching, either. I would rather patronize the place that offers the low price without being "forced" to. By keeping them in business, I will continue to have low prices I can take advantage of. If I just use them to brow beat my local place to price match then all I'm doing is helping put the low price place out of business. And once they're gone, there's no more price matching and I'm stuck paying full retail or whatever my local shop wants to charge.
That said, there is a balancing act between that and being willing to pay extra to buy stuff from my local shop to help make sure they stay around, too.
In the end, my process is something like "if the LDS has it marked for up to 20% higher, I'll buy it at the LDS. But, if they are higher than that, I buy it from the online place. But, I don't ask the LDS to price match." As BRT said, that is just supporting their policy of charging the maximum amount that they can.
Michael... the divers have found us but the industry sees us as an annoyance. A full page ad in any magazine for one month would pay for our biggest ad for a year. More people visit ScubaBoard in a week than subscribe monthly to any magazine. We have more visitors per month than the sum of all the magazine subscriptions. Like
@Wookie, I have to ask : Where are they? Why aren't they advertising? My guess is that I'm not a part of their 'Good ol' Boys club', so they won't use me. It sucks. I've got the divers, but not the advertisers.
It may be some of that, but I suspect it's also partly a general old school sentiment that print ads are worth "more" than Internet eyeballs. Combined with antipathy from the print media people towards online media.
I also suspect that there may be SOME merit to the notion that print ads are worth more than Internet eyeballs. If I'm reading a magazine and I have some interest in liveaboards and I see an ad for a liveaboard, it's not so easy to flip immediately to more info about many liveaboards, so I am more likely to really read the one ad I happen to see. But, if I'm online and something (say, an ad on a SB sidebar) sparks my interest in liveaboards, I'm much less likely to really absorb an ad about a particular liveaboard. Instead, I'm probably going to do a Google search for liveaboards and then read reviews and forum posts.
As a consumer, I genuinely feel like I'm much less influenced by online ads than by print ads on the same subjects.
As a business person, if I were trying to market a product or service, I would consider print ads, but for online marketing I would be much more inclined to engage in social media efforts and try to cultivate key influencers. If I wanted to sell BCDs, I would probably not run an ad campaign on SB. Instead, I would do some research to identify people on SB who are well respected and very active on SB and then approach them privately with a goal of getting them to use my BCD and then post good things about it.
I seem to recall some vendor (I can't even remember what the product was) a year so ago who openly solicited people to enlist in their Ambassador program. I would probably do something like that, except not be blatantly open about it. I think that backfired. When it's common knowledge that the manufacturer is doing that, suddenly every positive review of their product becomes suspect.
So, I wouldn't necessarily take it personally. Maybe you, too, are just being a little too old school in your thinking and your approach to generating revenue from SB. I think online advertising has evolved a fair bit from where it was 10 years ago.
