[December 06, 2016]

Retailers' Aggressive Pricing and Wide, Marketplace-Driven Assortments Challenge Amazon, Says Annual Boomerang Commerce Consumer Electronics Category Report

Boomerang Commerce, the leading Retail Performance Management solution, today releases its annual "Boomerang Insights: Consumer Electronics Category" report comparing top retailers' pricing, assortment and availability of this holiday season's popular electronic devices. This year's results reveal that Walmart and Jet are attacking Amazon on price. Meanwhile, Newegg and Walmart are leveraging their marketplace investments to compete on assortment. Walmart is managing inventory well with the lowest number of items out of stock after Amazon.

Key findings across data from Amazon, Best Buy (News - Alert), Jet, Newegg, Target and Walmart show:

• Amazon is still the one to chase. Amazon carries millions of items in its electronics category - more than 1.6 million items in the camera and photo selection alone - and optimizes its pricing strategy based on data signals like popularity.
• Walmart and Jet offer the lowest prices on a sample of Amazon's more popular electronics products, with 37 percent and 42 percent of analyzed items priced the same or lower than those found on Amazon, respectively. In contrast, Target (News - Alert) and Best Buy had only 18 percent and 17 percent priced the same or lower than the same sample of popular electronics products found on Amazon, respectively.
• Walmart and Newegg are nearing Amazon's selection based on their marketplace strategies. While scoring lower on price perception in the market, Newegg carries 70 percent of Amazon's more popular items, and 68 percent of Newegg's overlap is offered by third-party sellers. Walmart closely follows with a 68 percent overlap, 80 percent of which is supplied by third parties. In contrast, Best Buy, which is not using a marketplace strategy, only stocks 53 percent of Amazon's more popular electronics products while Target only had 25 percent.
• Amazon is narrowly beating the competition on product availability. Among the more popular items, only 1.2 percent are out of stock at Amazon, while 2.7 percent are out of stock at Walmart. Meanwhile, Target is at 6.8 percent while Jet has the lowest availability, with 28.8 percent of popular items out of stock.

Boomerang Commerce Insights reports are produced annually for different product categories. In this report on consumer electronics, Boomerang analyzed 1,800 items throughout the online stores of six leading retailers: Amazon, Best Buy, Jet.com, Newegg, Target and Walmart. The analysis is based on 600 randomly selected items from each of three tiers: more popular items, moderately popular items and less-popular (specialty) products. More details and examples for specific products can be found in the full report from Boomerang Commerce. The data used was compiled during November 2016.

About Boomerang Commerce

Founded in 2012, Boomerang Commerce is a leading retail technology company led by veterans from Amazon and McKinsey. Our Retail Performance Management suite enables retailers to drive profitable growth, streamline operations and realize their merchandising strategy in today's hyper-competitive, customer-driven world. Our flagship product, Boomerang Pricing Performance Management, rapidly analyzes, tests and deploys smart pricing strategies at scale for products across multiple channels. On average, Boomerang's customers - including 10 of the top 30 omni-channel retailers like Staples (News - Alert), Office Depot and Lowe's and etailers like Groupon Goods - achieve a double-digit-percentage growth in revenue and margin. The company is backed by Madrona Venture Group, Shasta Ventures and Trinity Ventures and has headquarters in Mountain View, California. To learn more, visit www.boomerangcommerce.com.

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