It has been a decade since the consumer electronics retailer shut down its online marketplace in the U.S., but Best Buy Co. is once more back in the game.
Best Buy launched an online marketplace place in 2011 and ran the site for five years until 2016. A host of issues, including weak sales and fierce competition from Amazon.com and others, forced the electronics retailer to shutter the business.
In the years since, Best Buy has been operating a marketplace for Canadian businesses and consumers. Now Best Buy, by this summer, plans to open a new and more diversified marketplace in the U.S.
“A longer-term opportunity we are working on is marketplace,” CEO Corie Berry told analysts on a recent earnings call. “We have an established growing third-party online marketplace in Canada, and we are planning to launch one in the U. S. targeting mid next year. We believe that as the trusted leader in consumer electronics (CE), we have an opportunity to leverage our positioning and assets to build a differentiated digital marketplace platform, thereby bringing our customers access to a much more expansive assortment and new categories.”
Best Buy ranks No. 8 in the Top 1000. The database is Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest North American online retailers. It falls under the Consumer Electronics category.
New Best Buy marketplace
In addition to serving up electronics, Best Buy also has plans to diversify its forthcoming marketplace with other product categories. It plans to include health and wellness and complementary products to electronics such as phone cases and home theater accessories.
“It’s been really interesting to watch our Canada counterparts operate a marketplace, which they have for a number of years, and to learn a bit from them about how maybe you can augment your more traditional assortment and ways of going to market with a bit of a deeper offering for your customers,” Berry told analysts. “So, I’ll start with that. The second thing is customer shopping behavior is very different. … You have to underscore how much more shopping is done digitally and how much deeper into the catalog you can go digitally if you have the right partners in more of a marketplace kind of model.”
Best Buy already has a landing page up for its upcoming marketplace. To gain sellers, the landing page prompts sellers to open a storefront based in large measure on Best Buy’s significant digital footprint, which includes:
- 200 million customers
- 10 billion site visits annually
- 1 million weekly online transactions
“This will be a curated tailored marketplace to the customer that is coming to shop with us and those deeper assortments that you would hope you could provide,” Barry said.
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