Eight of the top 25 best selling televisions on Amazon are sold by Best Buy. As a third-party seller, Best Buy sells 11 models by Toshiba and Best Buy house brand Insignia.
Best Buy and Amazon announced a product development partnership on April 18th this year, promising to introduce Best Buy’s TVs with Amazon’s Fire TV experience built in to Amazon. The TVs are available only in Best Buy stores, on bestbuy.com online, and on Amazon.com through Best Buy as a third-party seller. On Amazon they come with Prime even though Best Buy is not using FBA for storage.
The built in Fire TV experience, which comes with Alexa voice assistant, is key. The rest of the best selling TVs on Amazon - even those sold by Amazon itself - come with Roku instead. When the partnership was announced Roku shares were down 8.6%.
According to our research TVs sold by Best Buy have grown to dominate the Televisions category on Amazon. Since the first models launched late-May, they outsold most of the competition during Prime Day in July, and have become best sellers during Christmas. The Toshiba 32LF221U19 32-inch 720p HD TV has been the number one TV for close to two months. The more affordable Insignia NS-32DF310NA19 32-inch 720p HD TV follows it.
In the chart above each yellow dot represents a TV sold by Best Buy in the Top 100 of Televisions category. At the moment they are in #1, #5, #9, #10, #11, #17, #18, #25 and #47 positions in the top 100. The blue performance trend line is modeled using local polynomial regression (loess), a generalization of moving average and polynomial regression.
Best Buy is selling on Amazon as a seller, not first-party as a vendor to Amazon. With $42 billion in revenue last year, Best Buy has to be the largest business operating as a seller on Amazon. They recently became a Top 100 Amazon seller.
When the partnership was announced many raised the question “is Best Buy sleeping with the enemy?” The two companies are rivaling retailers, but they are also product companies. So far it looks like the partnership has been a win-win for both. “It’s only possible because we trust each other,” Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, said about the partnership.
