Best Buy admits it has two websites: Could be misleading customers

that is just cheap I wonder what other stores do this. Why is being brought up in a con... court?

This seems like Wire and line FRAUD! As well as deceptive trade practices!

What will happen in this case?

Last year I ran into a friend at a Best Buy in Texas and we both were asking about price discrepancies in the store vs. online. The sales person checked the web site and confirmed the higher store price.

My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I think we were both looking at a 360 package. I passed on it, and I think my friend opted to go with another online deal.

I remember the same thing happening to me, and naturally assuming I had made a mistake. Dual sites with dual prices was completely beyond anything I could have imagined.

Most likely, there were originally two sites for another reason (e.g. additional info for sales teams on there). But over time some deals didn't show up at the store version. No incentive to fix that if they believed it caused people to pay a higher price. They likely weren't thinking of it as fraud, if indeed these accusations are true.

I am not the least bit surprised about this. Best Buy is the most unscrupulous electronics retailer out there. I shop there as little as possible.
Last week I was there only because someone gave me a gift card from there. I had a coupon for 10% off specific items. I thought the coupon applied to the item I was buying, but apparently not since it came up with a discount of $0. However the clerk gladly took my coupon, so even thought it wasn't good on that purchase I now couldn't use it in the future. I had to fight with customer service just to get it back.
It's almost like they go out of their way to make shopping there unpleasant.

Throwing Best Buy's CEO in jail until he provides clear answers may speed up the investigation.

That's why when I go to Best Buy or Circuit City to shop I always take my wireless-broadband enabled Tablet Notebook with me, and I I pull up the websites. I have never had a salesperson or manager tell me I couldn't do it that way, and they have always honored the prices I have pulled up with them standing there.

And this is EXACTLY why one should take a dated print out to the store! And they say say I'm paranoid.

So, load up the appropriate deal page, then before you print, go into 'page setup' and make sure you have the url, the date, and time selected in the header/footer option. Sometimes landscape orientation is best for these super long dynamic urls.

Best Buy uses a intra site because thats the prices that are in the store. The intra site is shown on kiosks ect. Most employees know their is two sites and know how to get around it. It would be the employees fault for not showing her the correct price.

I had this happen once. I looked up a DVD box set on their site. I wanted it that day, so I checked to see if my local BB had one in stock. They did, I went down there, and they wanted $20 more for it. When I explained that their website had it cheaperr, they showed me this apparent false website with the higher price and I reluctantly paid the higher price, but I checked agian when I got home and it was againn the cheaper price on the site.

Everyone needs to relax a bit. I agree that BestBuy can be totally retarded at times but let's Occam's Razor this thing a bit first.

Every large business has an intranet site. Every company I've ever worked for since the late 80's has one. This is not unusual and these sites serve to provide all kinds of internal employee information from Human Resources info to internal forms and proceess information.

Would a retail company with so many employees allow them external internet access? Probably not from any "floor" stations.

Would BestBuy want to add the additional burden of internal lookups to their external web servers? No.

Would any company want to tie up any amount of expensive bandwidth with employees looking up the online ads? (They don't pay 45 bucks a month like consumers do.)

If I had to guess at how this happened I would think that BestBuy has on their Intranet a copy of the online ad so that when employees go to call it up it's served internally instead of hitting their external sites. This copy may not be updating correctly or they may just have a crap process around updating it.

To report that this site is intentionally fake and meant to mislead customer is not responsible at this time given the current facts. Their recent bad press and customer issues are probably even more of a reason they would not intentionally do this.

I'm not saying they don't suck and am not defending them. I am simply trying to point out that there is not always malice behing stupid computer/IT errors.

I've worked in the field at the top (or near it) of many IT organizations and it would horrify some people to know how many of these types of things happen and are caught just before they blow up.

This is, of course, a good argument for having that online ad up on your phone when you go into the store so you can show them what the real ad says.

Woo

When I went to school in the Twin Cities 03-04. I had a couple techie friends that worked at Best Buy who told me that they're told to use whatever method they see fit to make the sale. Lie if necessary.

This has happened to me several times with regards to DVD prices.

Finally I had to start taking actual printouts to the store and then argue with the glass-eyed zit-faced clerk who knows nothing about the store or the products. And once they relented they'd have to draw up a physically hand-written invoice in order to get me the correct price.

I hate that place and will only purchase loss-leaders from them.

This has happened to me several times with regards to DVD prices.

Finally I had to start taking actual printouts to the store and then argue with the glass-eyed zit-faced clerk who knows nothing about the store or the products. And once they relented they'd have to draw up a physically hand-written invoice in order to get me the correct price.

I hate that place and will only purchase loss-leaders from them.

I'm really confused, because this never happens at the store I work at. Nobody tells anybody to do shady things at my stores; maybe you all are the victims of some scheming management.

For example, we often get iPods on sale on BestBuy.com. If a customer finds this and wants it for that price, no problem--I use the Yahoo method to check the dotcom price, bring the product and customer to customer service, that rep checks it on the manager's computer (which runs normal Windows, on normal IE, no fancy Best Buy shell), and pricematches. I really don't even think about it.

I honestly believe this is exaggerating some stupid employees' mistakes. I really doubt there is bad intent, even though a lot of employee don't know the difference. The intranet version is intended to be an information tool for product in the store, and BestBuy.com is an alternative to the b&m store down the street and the one across town. They offer exclusive deals to entice you to not waste our store's labor, so we can focus on people who come in to see and experience products. That's really.. all there is. It's sad to see this get all blown up like this.

Well I'm sure people don't point out the fact that sometimes Best Buy will return your opened software or opened DVD or CD cause you threw a fit and you know darn well that anything sold on a CD or DVD medium is not refundable. I'm sure Best Buy would let you exchange if you were a day past the return policy and I'm darn sure there are people out there who try to cheat the restocking fee system by "resealing" their used Laptop. Customers cheat the store, but its wrong for the store to mislead at all... how ironic.

I two had a bad experience at best buy trying to buy a Computer Package that they did not have the printer for so they would not honor the price or substitute. If you would like to read more about my experience go here.
http://moryville.us/Views/?p=28

I am not surprised at this at all. It has happened to several friends and family members that I know of. I haven't shopped there in over a year because of their poor customer service.

Funny thing is, according to the Courant article Best Buy claims that their employees are trained to know how to switch between the two sites ("Although we have an intra-store web site in place to support store operations (including products and pricing), we are reminding our employees how to access the external BestBuy.com web site to ensure customers are receiving the best possible product price.").

I have a relative that worked there for a few months around this past Christmas - they told me she was not trained about the two, only how to call up the one site.

If bandwidth is a concern, setup a proxy array and pull down the latest copy of the site from the web overnight when stores are closed. They could coordinate the web updates to occur at a time when the site would be downloaded overnight while minimized outside traffic during peak hours. I'm sure all stores have some kind of server or machine in place to tie all the inventory in the store together and coordinate with the manager and Corp offices. Use that. Surely the Geek Squad could do that for them....maybe not....

They are most likely pulling the intranet site down from Corp office via a VPN or other point to point setup, so bandwidth woudl be irrelevant anyways since these connections would use the internet anyway to access the Corp version.

The reason behind the two different web site is that one reflects in store prices. The price in the store is usely higher because of the higher expences involved in operating a store.