Don

Best Buy admits it has two websites: Could be misleading customers (Download Squad)

Mar 12th 2007 8:55PM 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.