The TWICE Consumer Electronics Top 25 E-tailer’s list, together with our Consumer Electronics Top 100 and the Major Appliance Top 50 rankings, provide the entire spectrum of performance in the industry.
They also provide a baseline for retailers — and their suppliers — to see how individual companies and the industry itself is performing at retail.
The E-tail Top 25, with its online sales focus, and all the talk about the “death of shopping malls” and so on, is vital in showing how online sales performance can make or break established brands.
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Online sales are retail’s present and future. Established brick-and-mortar retailers have had since, oh, the early 2000s, to get it right. Heck, it isn’t even easy for leading e-tailers — except of course for Amazon — to adapt to the changing marketplace rapidly.
For me, here are some surprises on this year’s list: Apple’s sales went down 3.1 percent; Best Buy and Target grew theirs by the double digits; and wholesale club Costco increased its CE sales 15.1 percent online.
And then there is Sears’ online CE sales performance for calendar year 2015: down 26.7 percent. It is now ranked 23rd on the list, down from 14th, and had the biggest sales decrease of all 25 e-tailers in the report.
For all the talk about integrating in-store and online sales, Sears’ performance is still shocking to me, yet indicative of its overall problems in CE, major appliances and across the board.
Related:Sears Looking To Cash Out Kenmore As Losses Widen
At this point in the history of the Internet annual online sales increases are a prerequisite to be a retailer. It is a fundamental for retailers to be profitable and continue as viable entities.
To suffer a sales decrease on the magnitude of what Sears endured last year can only mean a death knell for the retailer in CE at the very least.
That’s a stark reminder for any CE retailer, whether privately-held independent dealer or publicly-held national chain.
