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Best Buy continues to rely on its US e-commerce business to drive growth in a competitive retail environment.
Best Buy’s e-commerce business is growing nearly 5x faster than the year prior. Online sales grew 24% year-over-year (YoY) in the first quarter, up from 5% YoY growth in Q1 2015.
E-commerce is playing a larger role in Best Buy’s overall business. The retailer generated approximately $832 million from e-commerce sales in the first quarter, which represents nearly 11% of its total US revenue. Compare that to last year when 8.5% of its US sales came from online.
For comparison, the US e-commerce industry at large is growing at roughly 14% YoY.
Personalized shopping appears to be a key component of Best Buy’s e-commerce strategy. In 2015, Best Buy rolled out a "recommendation engine" for its e-commerce properties that tries to predict what a shopper is interested in based on browsing and payment data. The company’s President of of Global E-Commerce Scott Durchslag has even said that he wants Best Buy to become “the Netflix of consumer electronics.”
Showing shoppers an e-commerce landing page that only consists of products and services they’re known to be interested in seems obvious, but many retailers still haven’t integrated this sort of personalization into their shopping apps and websites.
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