Sears Catches Best Buy in Online Traffic

• Posted by ToddSullivan
• on April 7th, 2009

Looks like my post yesterday was a day premature. Latest weekly and monthly numbers released today.

Week Ending 4/4

Month of March:

Month of Feb.

Best Buy has fallen from having 27% larger share of traffic over Sears in February to now being equal to it as of the first week in April. Thee are some seasonality issues at play here but that does not explain it all away. Were that purely the case we would be seeing similar changes in other retailers and the truth is 1-6 (Target (TGT), Wal-Mart (WMT), JCPenny (JCP) & Amazon (AMZN)) have stayed basically steady except for Sears and Best Buy.

Now, it could be appliances? Best Buy made a big push into the area over the past few years and this may be hurting them now. Sears’ new “Blue Crew” appliance price guarantee has recaptured market share for them so it is obvious the marketing of it has had a positive effect. This may be increasing searches on Sears’ site for these items at the expense of Best Buy.

This theory is further buttressed by the time of year. Folks expecting tax refunds would be using them for big ticket purchases like a new appliance. If all this is true, we should expect Sears’ traffic to begin to fall soon. People who expect refunds have most likely filed and received them already.

Should this traffic trend NOT reverse, then we should start to assume there may be a fundamental shift underway. The seasonal argument will be over, the tax refund theory will be exhausted leaving us electronics and clothing.

Since the other clothing retailers share has remained consistent, we should not assume Sears is picking up large gains here. That then leaves us with electronics. That would be the logical choice to extrapolate the reason for the gain at the expense of Best Buy.

Again, this is an unfolding story and a great detective exercise. We’ll see how it plays out.

Data from Hitwise.

Disclosure (“none” means no position):Long SHLD, WMT, none

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