Brick-and-Mortar Stores Strike Back Against Online Retailers

Shoppers looking to avoid long lines and physically draining shopping experiences have started to shift away from brick-and-mortar retailers and more towards online shopping.

Even the shoppers who travel to stores are “showrooming," a practice in which the shoppers examine and test out products at the traditional retailers, but later purchasing the item online at a lower price.

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Largely due to the rise in online shopping and showrooming, online retailers such as Amazon AMZN are expected to take significant traffic away from companies with very weak online presence like Marshalls and T.J. Maxx of the TJX Companies TJX.

Popular retailers like Best Buy BBY and Wal-Mart WMT, however, has built a strong online presence over the years and is taking significant steps to protect their market shares against e-commerce companies.

The biggest step the brick-and-mortar stores, including Best Buy, Staples SPLS and Target TGT, have taken against showrooming is matching the prices of authorized e-commerce websites:

"With the notable exception of accessories, Best Buy's prices are largely in line with those of Amazon, and in some cases were actually lower," stated BB&T Captial Markets analysts Anthony Chukumba and Eric Cohen in a recent report.

Also because of the compressed holiday shopping season this year, brick-and-mortar stores are expected to have extremely competitive prices even against online retailers as they try to empty the inventories as soon as possible.

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Traditional retailers are also offering exclusive items and deals this holiday shopping season to lure in customers. Best Buy is offering Samsung’s Galaxy in foreign blue color.

The brick-and-mortar stores are playing to their strengths this holiday season by offering solid prices and deals while implementing or expanding same-day delivery and in-store pick-up programs to ease the painful shopping experience.