Intuit acquires AisleBuyer: "Showrooming" Antidote?

Intuit has acquired AisleBuyer, which has a mobile application that allows merchants to support e-commerce operations by mobile phone.

Using AisleBuyer, users scan a product’s bar code in a store, see reviews and ratings, as well as pay for a product with a credit card, on the spot. The notion is that  Intuit's small business payment business benefits from extending merchant retail capabilities further in an online commerce direction.

The deal illustrates a key trend in recent months, namely a bigger emphasis in the mobile payments space on "commerce" than crosses the traditional in-store retailing and e-commerce sides of the retailing business.

In other words, retailers seem to be thinking in new ways about "brick and mortar" and online retail. Where it might once have been more common for store-based retailers to see online as the competition, thereby stifling their own online operations, many retailers seem to have shifted their thinking.

Now an online retailing effort is seen as competition with Amazon and other online outlets, not competition with the retailer's own online store. At the same time, there is a new understanding that "showrooming," where potential buyers check out online prices and delivery while in stores looking at merchandise, is a new problem to be solved.

Nobody can tell yet hot successful brick and mortar retailers will be at fending off showrooming, or how the balance between online and physical retailing will change in the future. The Intuit acquisition clearly is a bet on a future that has smaller retailers engaging in both online and traditional retail operations, supporting online shopping both in-store and at all other times.