I just spent my lunch hour searching for a particular product online and did not find that for which I was looking. What I found instead, however, is a very troubling reality: every major sportings good retailer in the country that has a website has outsourced their web operations (including inventory and fulfillment) to the same operator. I had visited a few sites before my hunch really began to crystalize.
The first thing I noticed was a little tag line at the bottom of the site that read:
*List price is for reference only. No sales may have occurred at this price. **See product page for details.
That's funny, I thought to myself -- the last site had the same note.
The second thing I noticed was how even though the look of each site was unique at first glance, the underlying design elements were identical. Coincidence I wondered? Probably just an off the shelf estore template.
The third thing I noticed was the fact the search results had the same behavior -- first a "no results found" response with Steps 1-2-3 on how to fix it. Then a refined search found lots of items, sorted from high-price to low-price.
By the time I had resorted the search results on the third site, I was amazed to discover the same products for sale at the same price points as the last store. Hmm... my wheels started spinning at that point.
Most of these are regional chains so perhaps they are all owned by the same mega-comglomerate? I checked out the About Us section of each website and found out that while Dick's is publicly traded, the others had their own histories (real or imagined). Hmm again.
I had to get to the bottom of this so I turned to Google. Within minutes I was on the trail:
"Global Sports today effectively services all of the national sporting goods retailers. Global Sports owns the business. They own the sales, they own the inventory, they do the marketing. Their partners, including Dick’s Sporting Goods, market the Web site in their circulars, and are paid a commission for the sales that happen on the site. But when a customer comes to the site and goes into DicksSportingGoods.com, it never mentions Global Sports. The relationship is totally transparent to our customers."
This reminds me of the pearl market depicted in John Steinbeck's The Pearl. Kino, a poor Mexican pearl fisher, discovers a great pearl and brings it to the market believing he will be rewarded for its true worth. Instead, all of the pearl buyers collude to low ball him and deny him an open and competitive market. Stall after stall, he goes trying to sell his magnificent pearl but encountering the same attitude and low offer that he just left. In reality, Steinbeck tells us, all of the vendors are but different doors to the same buyer and there is no competition.
Well, John Steinbeck, I'm afraid your story lives on today. The falsefronts today go by these names:
So much for competition.
