Internet Retailer breaks down the consumer electronics category into several subcategories, including computers and electronics, home entertainment, photography equipment and mobile devices.
Although the category as a whole made $93.24 billion in 2018 ecommerce sales, there are still mass merchants threatening to take consumer electronics’ retailers’ share of sales. Amazon.com Inc. dominated 31.8% of the electronics and accessories market in 2018, according to a study by Rakuten Intelligence, which tracks email receipts from a panel of 3.1 million online shoppers.
Some retailers in this category are combating this by working with the ecommerce giant. Best Buy, for example, opened a storefront on Amazon.com for its televisions, cameras and a range of limited electronics accessories. Dell Inc., Monoprice Inc. and GoPro Inc. also have storefronts on Amazon.com.
Other computer and electronics companies advertise on Amazon. According to digital marketing firm Kenshoo, computer and electronics brands they work with advertised 2.0 times more on Amazon during the 2019 Prime Day event than in 2018.
Apple Inc. is a new addition to the consumer electronics category in 2019, as Internet Retailer chose to exclude sales of digital goods, such as books and music, for retailers like Apple that sell both hardware and software. Despite its No. 1 ranking in the category, Apple stopped reporting iPhone sales in 2018—shortly before it disclosed that it sold fewer new iPhones than anticipated and cut its holiday sales outlook by $9 billion. But in its fiscal fourth quarter, Apple reported that it sold the same amount of iPhones as the prior year.
Google is also new to the category for similar reasons. The search engine giant, Ranked No. 10 in the Top 1000, grew ecommerce sales an Internet Retailer-estimated 33.7% in 2018.
Newegg Inc., No. 7 in the consumer electronics category, has been focused on making fulfillment easier for its customers. The consumer electronics and hardware retailer added more FedEx pickup locations to its network of Hold at FedEx Location service. The fulfillment company now has more than 12,000 FedEx locations in the U.S. for this service, including FedEx office retail stores, Walgreen stores, the Kroger Co. stores and Albertsons Inc. locations.
But Google’s Alphabet is looking to handle fulfillment in a different way. Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s Alphabet, became the first drone operator to receive Federal Aviation Administration clearing to operate as an airline, with plans to begin drone delivery in Virginia as soon as the end of October 2019.