E-commerce as a share of sales grows at Evine, but online and total sales fall about 5%.

E-commerce sales hovered at just less than half—48.1%—of Evine Live Inc.’s sales for the fiscal second quarter ended July 29.

The web and TV merchant reported net sales of $148.9 million for the quarter, which means online sales were about $71.6 million. Evine does not break out e-commerce sales figures.

Total Q2 sales declined 5.2% from $157.1 million in the year-ago quarter, when e-commerce represented 47.9% of sales, or about $75.3 million. Online sales, year over year, declined an estimated 4.9%.

Evine cites merchandising issues as a cause for the sales decline, CEO Bob Rosenblatt told investors on an earnings call, according to a SeekingAlpha transcript. Evine wants to focus on acquiring customers who have a higher customer lifetime value, and it plans to do that by reducing its promotions of consumer electronics, he says.

“Although consumer electronics products tend to bring in a disproportionate volume of customers, those customers usually buy once and provide less contribution margin,” Rosenblatt said. In Q2, home and consumer electronics were accounted for 23% of sales, up from 21% a year ago.

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Evine also plans to revitalize sales with a focus on mobile shoppers, video marketing and social media, Rosenblatt said. In the quarter, mobile sales accounted for 49.4% of e-commerce sales.

In July, Evine’s two larger TV shopping competitors teamed up when QVC Inc.’s parent company, Liberty Interactive Corp., announced it would acquire the remaining 62% in HSN Inc. that it didn’t already own. It was a stock deal valued at $2.1 billion. QVC Group is No. 7 in the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 1000, HSN is No. 28 and Evine is No. 117.

Rosenblatt told analysts that Evine will not be affected by this merger, as QVC and HSN have different retailing strategies than Evine. For example, Evine focuses on selling “hard-to-find” and curated newly introduced merchandise, while QVC and HSN sell billions of dollars worth of everything, he said.

“I don’t know what the future holds for QVC and HSN other than they are very large, and it looks like they are selling a lot of products that are also on other e-commerce and bricks-and-mortar platforms,” he said. “We hope to continue to move away from that model to really be a disruption retail business, selling merchandise in a different way and really being the arbiters of merchandise that’s not available everywhere else as opposed to doing it based on price,” Rosentblatt said.

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For the fiscal second quarter ended July 29 Evine reported:

  • Net sales of $148.9 million, a 5.2% decrease from $157.1 million in the year-ago quarter.
  • Net loss of $2.0 million, the same as Q2 2016.

For the first fiscal half of 2017:

  • Net sales of $305.3 million, a 5.8% decrease from $ 324.1 million in the year-ago period.
  • Net loss of $5.2 million compared with a lost of $6.9 million.
  • E-commerce comprised 49.4% of sales compared with 48.4%.
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