by Walmart and Amazon really are taking over the news lately in their ecommerce war to be Santas right hand man this Christmas. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Walmart have really begun to focus on their ecommerce offerings in a new strategy launched last year. A massive part of this plan to trump Amazon was to further broaden their ‘price matching’ service into the ecommerce sphere, by also recognizing marketplace vendors. The price matching policy itself states that “We’re committed to providing low prices every day, on everything. So if you find a current lower online price from an online retailer on an identical, in-stock product, tell us and we’ll match it.” However, within hours…this plan had severely backfired.
A few clever buyers decided to try to beat the system by creating fake Amazon profiles and lowering product prices astronomically, which they then printed and presented to the oblivious Walmart store managers …and left with their marked down product in hand. These customers were quick to log into Twitter to share the love and soon enough there were tons of scammer adverts being placed online to take advantage of the price matching service in store, with many buyers obtaining $400 Playstation 4 consoles for less than 25% of the retail price.
Walmart have now revised the policy and limited the service to 30 approved retailers, however what’s done is done – and this glitch in their matrix is going to result in a lot of smiling faces this Christmas!