Best Buy Big Box Goes Semantic
December 1, 2010
I have a distant recollection that Best Buy had two ways to present prices. One way was the public Web site and the other way was the information available in the store. That’s one of those semiotic moments that keep me from visiting the big box behemoth.
Best Buy is using the Semantic Web in some remarkable ways to harness data from their website. The article “The Semantic Web Delivers For Best Buy. So Why Not For Your Business, Too?” points out various ways that Best Buy uses data to improve customer experiences, both on their website and in their retail stores.
Best Buy has over 600,000 products available online, however the majority of online sales come from a small portion of those products. By using Semantic Web technologies, Best Buy can make some of the lesser known products come to the forefront in customer searches.
In addition, the company has started using a Semantic Web plug-in on their local store blogs that will “grab data about the SKU, plug in the Open Box price and the reason returned, and publish it to the site, usually on a weekly basis.” This effort has shown an increase in customers arriving at physical stores looking for Open Box products. Best Buy is at the forefront of these technologies and continues to find new ways to use them. How will other companies emulate this success? A starting point is one set of prices.
Laura Amos, December 1, 2010
Freebie
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