Consumers Forced to Read Fine Print in Cyber Monday Deals

Judah Zeigler, Panasonic director of e-commerce, reiterated what he told us last week when the Panasonic club deal went out to members: “The growth of the Panasonic direct-to-consumer e-commerce business is a strategic priority for Panasonic.” He said it’s not the company’s goal to try to “irritate its channel partners.” Regarding pricing, which some dealers have said is below MAP, Club Panasonic is not violating MAP policies regarding public pricing, Zeigler said. He detailed the process members have to go through to join the Panasonic club, which includes creating an account and putting a product in a virtual cart to view pricing. “That makes us MAP-compliant,” he said.

Panasonic ran the “you-pay-what-we-pay” promotion last year, too, Zeigler said. “Our goal is to have promotions much like that that most of our channel partners do,” he said. “We were nowhere near as competitive with a lot of pricing that I saw over the weekend,” he added. “It’s not our goal to match those kinds of prices,” he said. Black Friday through Cyber Monday is a “key promotional period,” he said, and in addition to driving e-commerce as a strategic part of business, “our goal is to try to also attract incremental customers,” he said.

Panasonic’s price on the Lumix FP7 ($99) camera was $45 lower than Amazon’s, which Zeigler attributed to the product having reached the end of its life cycle. Panasonic’s price on the DMP-BDT210 3D Blu-ray player, regularly $99, was $69 on Cyber Monday compared with Amazon’s $70, but some dealers complained about the $69 price as “below dealer cost.” Panasonic sold the DVD-S68 DVD player for $37.49, compared with Amazon’s $49.18, but Zeigler said that price was “a mistake,” and the company corrected it. Amazon came out with a better deal for the Viera X3 series 50-inch plasma at $495.88 compared with Panasonic’s $529. Panasonic sold out of the 50-inch X3 series TV by noon and referred customers to its other retailers instead.

Most Cyber Monday sales were modest compared with the doorbuster prices that lured customers to stores on Black Friday. Target added several TVs with temporary price cuts to its Cyber Monday menu. The 720p Westinghouse LD-3257DF 32-inch TV was trimmed by $20 to $279, the Sony NSX40GT1 40-inch 1080p 60Hz LCD TV was chopped by $200 to $599 (matched at Sonystyle.com) and a Westinghouse 24-inch 1080p TV came in $30 under the regular price to $199. The Tom Tom VIA 1505M GPS navigation unit dropped $100 to $89 in a temporary price cut at Target, and the Flip Ultra was whittled to $49 from $79, according to the website.

We found that listed deals weren’t necessarily good deals for consumers. Target listed the Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch Reader with a “price cut” from $139 to $99, when, in fact, the Simple Touch carries a regular price of $99 at Barnes & Noble and other retailers. Amazon pushed the Canon S95, a 10-megapixel point-and-shoot camera marked down $108 from $399, but comparison shopping site Retrevo.com listed the camera as “over the hill” and “selling at a price higher than its capabilities.”

Barnes & Noble, which lopped $20 off a “limited edition” Nook Simple Touch Reader on Black Friday, resumed regular $99 pricing on the e-reader on Cyber Monday but threw in a $25 gift card as a bonus. Customers who bought any new Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader online using a MasterCard received a bonus $25 Barnes & Noble gift card and free shipping, the company said.

To get customers into stores on for its Cyber Sale, which ran Sunday and Monday, Best Buy offered a $10 e-card with in-store pickup of orders priced $100 and up. The lead laptop at Best Buy was a $279 15-inch Toshiba laptop with AMD processor and 2GB RAM. Garmin’s nuvi 1300 GPS was slashed $50 to $89. The Nook Simple Touch came in at $79, and Kobo’s eReader Touch Edition was knocked down to $99 from $129. Acer’s Iconia tablet sold out by early afternoon Monday at $229, a big-time bargain compared with the $450 tag it debuted with in June. Best Buy nicked $100 from the regular price of Sony’s lineup of Google TVs, but the 40-inch NSX-40GT1 was selling for the same $599 at J&R and Dell.com, we found.

Sony touted the “lowest price of the year” on numerous products, including the E series Vaio laptop, dropped $70 to $399. The unit was sold out by Monday afternoon, and the next best available deal started at $419 for a customizable PC. Sony’s BDP-S185 Blu-ray player, regularly $99, was discounted $20 at the Sony store, and its two higher end 3D Blu-ray players were each cut by $90 to $89 and $109. Amazon matched the $89 price of the BDP-S480.

A quarter of Black Friday shoppers were at stores by midnight on Black Friday, either waiting for stores to open or visiting retailers who opened on Thanksgiving evening, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation. While just over 51 percent of shoppers were angling for apparel deals, nearly 39.4 percent bought electronic items, up from 36.7 percent last year, NRF said. A record 226 million shoppers visited stores and websites over Black Friday and the following weekend, up from 212 million last year, according to NRF, and they spent on average $398.62 during the weekend, up from $365.34 last year, it said. The NRF survey, which polled 3,826 consumers, was done Nov. 24-26 by BIGresearch.

Of the 533 respondents who took part in CEA’s 2011 Black Friday Weekend Survey, 61 percent said the deals they found over the weekend were good or excellent, with six out of 10 ranking in-store sales better than online. Only 35 percent said online sales were good or excellent, CEA said. NRF said 30.8 percent of shoppers hit electronics stores over the weekend. More than a quarter of American consumers with tablets said they did or will purchase items with their devices, and 37.4 percent will or have researched products and compared prices with their tablets, NRF said.

As for Black Friday results on the ground, tablets and smartphones were the top sellers at Nebraska Furniture Mart, while the TV category lost much of its shine, said Mark Shaw, CE division merchandise manager at Nebraska, which promoted a TCL-brand 32-inch 720p LED backlit LCD TV at $147, down from the standard $499 price. TVs “aren’t the hot category they once were, but customers are still out there buying them,” Shaw said. Nebraska also bundled a $50 reward card with each iPad it sold on Black Friday, apparently in a bid to promote repeat business.

Nebraska opened its locations at 6 a.m. Black Friday, an hour earlier than it did last year, Shaw said. Still, his chain conceded a lot of customer foot traffic to those stores that started sales at midnight or earlier, he said. Most national chains started Black Friday sales at midnight on Thanksgiving night, but regionals typically opened their doors later. “It seems like the regional guys that opened up later didn’t do as well versus those that opened earlier,” Shaw said. The shopping malls that opened at midnight “were the winners and you will see more of them opening at that time next year,” Citigroup analyst Jeff Black said.

Office superstore chains suffered “the worst customer traffic of the week,” largely because they lost share to the national chains that opened at midnight, said Kate McShane, retail hardlines analyst at Citigroup. Best Buy’s strong sales of tablets were negated by double-digit price declines in TVs, McShane said. Best Buy’s average Black Friday discount increased to 45.9 percent this year from 37.6 percent a year ago, she said.