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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - North America

Analyst Weblog

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Circuit City to close all operations

January 19, 2009

On Friday, Circuit City announced that the company is closing 567 stores and will be laying off more than 30,000 workers. During the holiday season, despite being one the top visited websites among the Retail 500 on Thanksgiving (#5), Black Friday (#7), and Cyber Monday (#9), there was a decline in the market share of visits from previous years. For the week of Thanksgiving, which is typically a peak traffic week, the market share of visits to CircuitCity.com had dropped 33% from the previous year within the Appliances & Electronics category.

Circuitcity WMS 1-17.png

The demographics for Circuitcity.com shifted from the previous Thanksgiving holiday as well. The biggest loss was affluent shoppers with an income over $150k where a share of 4% of total traffic represented by the group was lost and replaced by visitors with lower household incomes.

Circuitcity thxgiving demos.png

The consumer electronics space has always been a very competitive category, which is illustrated through the websites appearing in Circuitcity.com’s downstream, where 29% of visitors were cross-shopping or visiting another retail website. Not surprisingly, Bestbuy.com received the highest share of traffic in December followed by Walmart.com, Target.com, and Amazon.com. Each of these retailers along with several others in the electronics category are likely to benefit from Circuit City’s demise.

Circuitcity dec downstream.png