Worst Buy?
Today, the UK arm of the US based mega-retailer Best Buy launched their online store.
I was excited to see what fantastic launch offers they might have, after their brick and mortar shops have had some great opening offers, and hoped that increased competition in the sector might end up being good for customers.
I loaded it up, and didn’t see any launch offers thrust in my face as I had expected. No matter, I though, I’ll probe futher into the video games section as see what they have.
Upon clicking on “Gaming”, I was prompted with this message:
Best Buy Entertainment is managed in conjunction with The Hut Group. It has a separate shopping basket, checkout and Customer Services to the rest of bestbuy.co.uk. As such you will need to set up a separate account for this site with your payment and delivery details.
Hmmmm.
So Best Buy are adding their name to the long list of retailers who have given up on running their own online retail service, and are yet another front for The Hut. I’m starting to get worried, The Hut Group appear to be expanding rapidly and unchecked, and the quality of service they offer has got worse and worse.
So what’s different about Best Buy that other outlets ran by the hut? The pricing is basically the same as The Hut, and a quick browse of their slightly broken site hasn’t resulted in me finding anything worthy of posting on SavyGamer so far. They do offer a price match policy, where they will pricematch and give you 10% of the difference if you can find something cheaper elsewhere. Great idea, except they will only price match with places that are notorious for being expensive (currys.co.uk, pcworld.co.uk, argos.co.uk. johnlewis.co.uk and comet.co.uk). Why not Shopto? GAME? Gamestation? Amazon? Play? Worse yet, they exclude any “promotional or sale price”. So they will only match against full RRP then? We all know that every single retailer always has a sale or promotion on.
I’ve spent a long time looking, and I can’t actually find any items that qualify for their pricematch that aren’t available even cheaper at a retailer that they don’t acknowledge the existence of.
I did contact Best Buy for their side of things, and not yet had a response. I’ll let you know if I do hear back from them. I’m currently unimpressed though.
I’d never even heard of the Hut before coming to this site. My online buying is fairly limited to play.com and Steam (and occassionally ironmaiden.com, whoo). I’ve always been afraid of firing out my card details to someone I don’t know and trust even if it has a cheaper price – perhaps it because of the likes of the Hut that I feel that….
One day Lewie they’ll make a film about your struggle against the evils of The Hut Group. Bruce Willis could play you.
or Chris Evans, the Radio 2 presenter.
Bruce Willis with Chris Evans’ glasses and you’re done.
I’m becoming increasingly suspicious of The Hut, and what looks a lot like price fixing.
They should include Amazon in the list of places they’ll price match, then – I’ve never seen anything on Amazon that was at its “full” price, everything is always “on sale” by at least a cent.
Uh, I meant exclude. Corrected.
Is it really that much of a bother? You speak with your wallet, if the price isn’t good simply don’t buy from them and they’ll soon get the message. Someone will always undercut them if they’re price fixing, and lets face it The Hut can’t run everything.
Remember, we’re the savvy few.
Mr and Mrs Stupid and their snot nosed children won’t know Zavvi, ASDA etc. are all tentacles of the great Hut-beast. As long as they have plenty of copies of Generic Manshoot 6 in stock come release day they’ll do fine.
Going by the #zavvifail thread, they wouldn’t get Generic Manshoot 6 on release day, nor for 3 months afterwards.
Never had a problem with Zavvi.
Don’t bother with them then. That site looks bloody awful. I wouldn’t trust them more than I would a dirty syringe. To be honest I’m surprised you continue to remain so neutral as to still include The Hut and their offers at all.
You might want to include thegamecollection.net though. They’ve proven very fast and reliable for me. As in the game ordered late afternoon shows up the following morning. Certainly beats The Hut’s ‘on order for 3 weeks’ crap.