Best Buy Making Online Price Matching Permanent

Remember back in October when Best Buy announced it would price match online retailers during the holiday season? It looks like the electronics retailer is making that a permanent policy now. Best Buy announced that it would be fighting off "showrooming" by price-matching a handful of both local and online retail competitors permanently.

Starting March 3, Best Buy's "Low Price Guarantee" policy will go into effect for all Best Buy locations, as well as its website, mobile stores, and even phone orders. The retailer plans to match prices for all local competitors, as well as a total of 19 online retailers, including Amazon, Apple, and Newegg. However, this good news will come at a cost.

Alongside the year-round price matching, Best Buy is lowering its return policy deadline from 30 days to 15 days, which isn't too big of a deal, because that's still over two weeks that you have to decide if you want to return something or not, but it may deter some shoppers from buying something too soon, with the fear that the return policy deadline will pass.

However, one of the things that the price matching policy doesn't apply to are smartphones under contract, but the company says that things such as smartphone chargers. It seems more and more retailers are heading towards this route, with Target offering permanent price matching just last month. Could it soon be the end of ridiculous markups in brick-and-mortar stores?

[via Bloomberg]