Viewers want a quick way to buy the products they see in commercials through their TVs, according to a new study from LG Ad Solutions.

In its Shoppable TV Report: 2024 and Beyond, LG said 53% of connected TV viewers
had a quick option to buy advertised products and 63% said they wished they could see inventory from the store or brand from their TV.

With the proliferation of smart TV and streaming, TV platforms and advertisers are zeroing in on T-commerce as an extension of their advertising efforts. 

“Most CTV users envision and desire a TV experience that enables them to easily purchase the products advertised to them,” LG Ad Solutions chief marketing officer Tony Marlow said. “The future of television is shaping up to be an immersive canvas of personalized, interactive experiences. We are entering an era where TV is not just a device for passive viewing, but also a dynamic platform for engagement, interaction, and shopping.”

According the survey, 81% of CTV users are influenced by TV ads in their shopping decisions and 63% often discover new brands and products through TV ads. 

Additionally, 47% have made a purchase after seeing a TV ad in the past three months. Of those consumers, most (56%) completed a purchase using their mobile phone, followed by laptop/desktop (45%), in-store (31%), tablets (31%) and on CTV (29%).

The LG report said that about 70% of viewers like TV ads that include a QR code, with 38% likely to make a purchase after scanning a QR code on a TV ad. Scanning a QR code to get a discount was something that appealed to 49% of those surveyed.

Viewers said they were most likely to buy clothing, apparel or electronics through the TV. 

The study, released surveyed more than 1,200 U.S. consumers to determine their perceptions of shoppable TV advertisements and subsequent purchasing behavior, LG said.

QVC Plus, the home-shopping TV service’s streaming brand, on Friday is launching Outdoor Escape, a new around-the-clock streaming channel dedicated to gardening and outdoor living.

The seasonal channel will be hosted by popular QVC personality and gardening expert Sandra Bennett, Soumya Sriraman, who joined Qurate Retail Group last year as president of streaming, told Broadcasting+Cable.

Outdoor Escape will feature lifestyle shows from QVC and HSN and give viewers easy access to purchasing products.

Qurate‘s QVC and HSN, the oldest names in shoppable TV, are evolving their approach as streaming creates new ways for viewers to buy what they see on the screen.

While more traditional programmers are embracing shoppable TV technology to create incremental revenue streams, one of Sriraman’s priorities is making programming more human. 

"This is a company that has taken to heart storytelling and bringing emotion into commerce is at the core of what it does every single day,” said Sriraman, who was with Britbox and Amazon before joining Qurate.

At the same time, adding distribution via streaming gives QVC more opportunities to reach viewers and viewers more ways to consume programming, interact and make transactions.

The company's  QVC and HSN linear channels are available as free ad-supported streaming TV channels (FAST). s QVC Plus and HSN Plus stream on platforms including  Roku, Amazon Fire, LG, Xfinity Flx and Samsung Smart TV. It is also looking to create new free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels at a time when consumers are cutting the cord with traditional cable.

Last year, it created a seasonal Christmas in July channel.

“We found that to be hugely successful with our audience,” Sriraman said. “Audiences are responding to this idea of giving them channels they can watch and discover new products and new content as they sit back and watch.”

Gardening has been a mainstay on QVC’s main channel, making the category ripe for a streaming channel. For now, Outdoor Escape is available only on QVC’s app, but another channel, The Big Dish, is in the process of being distributed on more FAST platforms.

The company will see how Outdoor Escape performs. There’s a chance it will keep running past the summer. And the company has more seasonal channels in the pipeline. Some may be based on lifestyle categories, others may be built around the network’s personalities.

More Ways for Viewers to Buy

With streaming, viewers will have more ways to buy, including interacting with QR codes. Some viewers still like to call the channel to make purchases, though, Sriraman said. “We’re not limiting the ways people want to buy.”

On traditional TV, QVC pioneered shop-by-remote technology that the company will be rolling out on its streaming channel.

“The audience’s ability to transact and watch seamlessly is important, so the more opportunity someone has to get access to your channel, the more likely they are to deeper with you,” she said.

Streaming means “we now are not tethered to someone’s cable box,“ Sriraman said. ”You can take us with you wherever you go and you can watch our hosts that we know our audiences love, and you can discover things without having to be live.”

Sriraman is aware that traditional TV is looking for ways to build its commerce business. “It feels like everyone thinking about it as interactive ads,“ she said. ”We’ve always talked about it as interactive programming.”

It would appear likely that given the improvements in connectivity and technology, streaming viewers buy more stuff than TV viewers, but Sriraman said the company was not sharing that data. “We can say we’re super-excited about what we’ve seen since last year, and really excited about how the expansion of distribution on FAST is additive,” she said.

Sriraman is also looking forward to the launch of a new show, Design School with Ballard Designs, which will launch on QVC Plus March 24.

In each 30-minute episode, Ballard Design’s Caroline McDonald will guide viewers through the design process while tackling a challenge sent in by QVC viewers.

Design School will include shoppable entertainment features.

The show is designed to bring Ballard Design, traditionally a catalog brand, to life, Sriraman said.

“We all know that there are many things that are better told with video than in print or just static digital,” she said. "We’re very excited about the show.” ■

In the race to pick the pandemic’s winners and losers, some executives argue that the deadly crisis could make home shopping and e-commerce a more important part of the TV industry.

In sharp contrast to the difficulties faced by traditional media businesses, which have been roiled by slumping ad revenue, layoffs and production shutdowns, government-mandated stay-at-home orders have boosted TV viewing, producing a marked rise in home shopping for products that consumers normally buy in shuttered brick-and-mortar retail outlets.

RELATED: Pandemic Changes the Home Shopping Mix

“The stay-at-home orders are producing a seismic shift in the way consumers shop,” said Brian Meehan, co-founder and chief operating officer of Knocking, a content creation and commerce company that works with media partners like Univision Communications, Cox Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group on their e-commerce efforts. “Every day is now Cyber Monday, and every day is bigger than the last.”

Meehan and others contend the crisis could prompt a wider shift towards e-commerce in the media sector. Knocking founder and CEO Markus Reinmund said a long-term decline in traditional linear TV advertising, accelerated by the pandemic, will push media companies to find better ways to monetize their content.

“In a short, two-month time frame, stay-at-home orders have really accelerated the long-term trend in consumer markets towards home shopping,” Reinmund said. “Consumers have more time to engage with media and TV viewing is up. But media companies are not profiting from this because they are seeing a dramatic decline in ad revenue. So, finding ways to be less dependent on ads and actually earn a share of the consumer spending is becoming a very attractive idea.”

Interest in that idea can be seen in efforts by Qurate Retail, NBCUniversal, Univision, ABC, Amazon Studios and Discovery, as well as major TV-station groups like Sinclair and Cox Media.

“The overall market for home shopping and selling direct to consumers is obviously something that will only continue to grow,” NBCUniversal executive VP, head of marketing and advertising creative Josh Feldman said.

Last year, Comcast-owned NBCU launched ShoppableTV, which encouraged consumers to use their smartphones to buy products while watching such programming as French Open tennis, the Tour de France cycling race, Songland and Very Cavallari simply by taking a photo of a code on the screen.

This June, NBCU will dive even deeper into e-commerce with the launch of the NBCUniversal Checkout commerce system, which will simplify the process of buying goods via ShoppableTV content and branded videos and web articles.

Clicking with Commerce

In the pandemic’s early days, though, much of the e-commerce growth has been gobbled up by the already dominant giant online retailers. Amazon, for example, reported $75.5 billion in net sales of goods and services in the first quarter of 2020, up 26% from a year earlier, with net sales from its online stores hitting $36.7 billion in Q1, up 24% from Q1 2019. The tech giant has forecasted an 18% to 28% jump in total net sales for Q2 of 2020.

How much of this growing market can be captured by TV companies is open to question, given that most of the industry has little experience with retail. It’s also unclear if the growth in e-commerce makes up for lost ad revenue from brick-and-mortar retailers that are in increasingly precarious financial straits. Retailers accounted for 14.5% of the TV ad spend in 2019, MediaRadar estimated.

A recent survey by Elevate at the media research and consulting firm SmithGeiger found 46% of Americans were spending more time shopping online. Half of the people sampled also said they spent more time watching TV for entertainment, and 41% noted that they were watching more local news.

“The shift in shopping patterns is here to stay,” noted Andrew Finlayson, executive VP of digital strategies at SmithGeiger, which does work for Knocking. That, in his view, opens up e-commerce opportunities for TV companies. “Consumers that were resistant and not shopping at home now have the full experience of doing it and in many cases might be continuing this behavior in the future.”

Another trend driving increased interest is the growing use of streaming platforms. In the first quarter, Roku had 39.8 million active accounts and time spent streaming as up 49% year over year, VP of content distribution Tedd Cittadine said.

“This is having a positive impact lifting the viewership for many of our channel partners, including the home-shopping channels that have seen, on average, double-digit increases in viewership time during the first three months of 2020,” he said.

Viewership gains are welcome news for traditional home-shopping channels, which have struggled in recent years because of larger industry-wide declines in pay TV subscriptions and linear TV viewing.

In 2019, Qurate Retail, which owns QVC and HSN, reported a 4% drop in sales to $13.46 billion.

iMediaBrands, the owner of ShopHQ and the Bulldog Shopping Network, saw even bigger declines, with net sales of $501.8 million for the fiscal year ending Feb. 1, 2020, down from $596.6 million in fiscal 2018.

Qurate Retail responded to the decline with a major expansion in digital operations. In August 2019, it launched a live streaming app with on-demand video and six channels on Roku and Amazon’s Fire TV. The Roku app now has more than 3 million installs, making it one of the platform’s top 25 free apps, said Todd Sprinkle, QVC’s senior VP of brand creative and production.

Qurate brands also have bolstered their presence on social-media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, with over 350 hours of content each week on Facebook Live; added linear streams on smart TV platforms like Samsung TV Plus and LG Channel Plus; and an expanded presence on local broadcast stations.

“Over the years, the model has evolved from linear TV into a multiplatform shopping experience that spans web, broadcast, mobile and social platforms,” QVC’s Sprinkle said. “We can reach a greater proportion of households today than we could 10 years ago,” even with multichannel cord-cutting.

Since the start of the pandemic, Sprinkle said, “we are seeing increased interest online in items that are helpful in the home,” with page views for a number of items increasing in March. Categories upwardly affected include food (up 66% from a year earlier on QVC and 48% on HSN.com), home-office gear (77% on QVC.com and 234% on HSN.com), wellness (up 143% on HSN.com) and health and fitness (up 126% on HSN.com).

Check It Out

These trends are occurring as a number of major programmers are rethinking their business models with new ad products and e-commerce applications.

Early efforts in that direction seem promising, with companies like Knocking, Univision and NBCU reporting successful e-commerce efforts.

“We’ve had an incredible response with the conversion rate of ShoppableTV being around 30% higher than the average e-commerce conversion rate,” NBCUniversal’s Feldman said.

Next month’s launch of NBCUniversal Checkout will further strengthen those efforts] by simplifying the creation of e-commerce offers and streamlining the consumer experience, Feldman said.

RELATED: Working for Pandemic Relief

Checkout is part of NBCU’s On Platform ad offering and its larger push into advanced advertising systems.

“Checkout can turn any branded video or web article into a native shoppable experience,” he said. “You can go to a video of a holiday gift buying guide and buy multiple brands in one checkout in the most frictionless way without the viewer ever leaving the environment they came for.”

A shift in viewing and consumer focus towards digital media and streaming should make such efforts even easier.

Univision, for example, currently has e-commerce offerings for national linear TV, local TV stations, online, social media and radio. “Being on multiple platforms was a key part of our strategy from the start,” Univision Local Media senior VP of growth initiatives John Buergler told Multichannel News.

In June of 2019, Univision partnered with Knocking to launch Gangas & Deals, a digital shopping market for Hispanics, with six- to eight-minute segments featuring upcoming brands on the morning show Despierta America. As part of the multiplatform efforts, Univision posts clickable materials on Instagram, where consumers can easily buy products.

Adding e-commerce options to the video on streaming platforms would be a logical next step that would greatly simplify the purchasing process, though Univision and most other media companies have not yet made that move.

Discovery’s Food Network Kitchen subscription video-on-demand service launched last October on Amazon’s Alexa, Fire TV and other platforms with features that would allow users in select markets to buy ingredients for some of its cooking show lessons.

And Amazon Prime Video’s original series Making the Cut with Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn, which premiered in March, allows viewers to purchase fashions featured in the competition show.

Data-Driven Dollars

Cittadine said Roku’s connected-TV platform already has a number of attractive features for e-commerce. The Roku Pay setup, used to buy app subscriptions on the platform, can streamline the checkout process, and Roku’s extensive data collection and analytics efforts could help companies promote their products, create targeted ads and develop more compelling e-commerce strategies.

“We’re still in the early days of shopping on streaming services,” Cittadine said. “But you can imagine the opportunities this creates when you can target the right consumer who is looking for a product with embedded purchasing power and interactivity.”

That makes improved data and measurement of audience engagement one of the key opportunities surrounding e-commerce efforts.

Last fall, Knocking began testing short, one-to-three-minute “Local Steals & Deals” segments that could be placed in local newscasts. In March, it fully launched the product, which now airs on stations owned by TV groups including Cox Media and Sinclair.

The exact format is up to the stations. Typically, a local anchor or personality will introduce the segment, which is produced by Knocking and hosted by former QVC personality Lisa Robertson. Local Steals & Deals features upcoming brands selected by Knocking and is typically part of the newscast or show, rather than an ad.

The segments are crafted as editorial content, with brands that have compelling stories about the entrepreneur behind the companies or the causes they support, rather than straight product pitches, Knocking executives said. As editorial content, they also don’t have to take away from ad time and have the long-term benefit of providing valuable data about the consumers.

“It is a fundamental shift in the business model for media,” Knocking’s Reinmund said. “Instead of just exposing them to an ad, I can go way beyond that. I’ll have actionable deep-engagement data and I can build a relationship with a consumer that will be much deeper and more valuable.”  

The pandemic has prompted a rise in the number of people buying products from home, but for top shopping channels like QVC and HSN, the increase in interest was a mixed blessing as customers shifted from buying high-margin offerings like fashion and jewelry to less-profitable home categories.

QVC and HSN parent Qurate Retail Group, which also includes online retailer Zulily, saw revenue in the first quarter dip about 5%, to $2.9 billion. Operating income fell 20% as the shift to low-margin offerings and an increase in costs associated with its fulfillment centers and employees during the pandemic ate into profits.

About 10,000 Qurate employees are now working from home and the company has spent about $19 million in emergency pay and benefits for its workers. Qurate has committed about $10 million to support urgent needs in its communities, including donating airtime for public-service announcements, participating in the Small Business Spotlight initiative with the National Retail Federation; a global PPE-creation project funding artisans globally with female-founded nonprofit group Nest; and relief programs like Meals on Wheels and No Kid Hungry.

Qurate president and CEO Mike George said sales began to rebound late in March and have continued into April. Qurate’s online businesses had strong showings in the quarter, with traffic on the QVC website up about 30% compared to the prior year and live streaming over social media rising 100%. Home viewership at the QVC and HSN channels was up 10% in the period.

On a conference call with analysts, George said though it is still early in the second quarter, the April growth is consistent and evident across several product segments.

“We’ve seen it across new customers, reactivated customers, occasional customers and core customers,” George said. “We’ve seen it across a range of home categories, electronic categories, beauty categories. The only place we’re not seeing it is in apparel, accessories and jewelry. So I’d characterize it as consistent, broad-based sales growth.”

The shift wasn’t exactly an accident, George added. Qurate foresaw the changes in buying habits associated with the pandemic, and tailored its message and offerings to meet them.

Tailored to the Times

Qurate blew up most of its on-air
programming calendar, inventing new programs that would address the moment, like Love Your Home, a home-products show that replaced Beauty iQ, and airing afternoon miniseries to take advantage of an increase in viewership during that time slot.

QVC, HSN and Zulily also beefed up their home-products inventories to focus on new trending categories like home, sanitation, food and storage, business tools, tech resources for distance learning and
beautification. The company also leaned
into its social media platform, including the #PostAtHome campaign on QVC, which featured hosts live streaming from their homes, and Cornerstone Brands’ Grandin Roads #MakeYourDoorHappy, encouraging viewers to share their front door decorations on social media.

QVC and HSN saw increases in home-fitness products — sales of bikes, treadmills and ellipticals were all up — as well as vitamin supplements and home-office products like laptops, tablets, printers and monitors. Viewers also were interested in boosting connectivity with family and friends as shelter-in-place orders continued, leading to increased sales of video-calling devices like Amazon’s Echo Show and Facebook Portal.

Qurate said about two-thirds of
new customers in the quarter came in organically, reflecting the power of its brands. Now, George said, Qurate will step up marketing spending to attract and retain new customers.

“We’ve seen improved efficiency across all marketing channels, including paid social, which gives us a powerful platform to highlight our unique shopping experience and are moving quickly to convert new customers into lifetime customers with campaigns that build relationships by focusing on what makes us unique and targeted emails, digital nurturing through retargeting and the piloting of additional social channels and ad formats,” George said on the call.

Lower Margins, Higher Costs

Evercore ISI analyst Oliver Wintermantel wrote in a research note that while the April sales growth is encouraging — he revised his Q2 revenue estimates upward to a 1% decline — the mix in products to some lower-profit merchandise comes at a time of additional operating costs related to the pandemic. Wintermantel expects EBITDA margins to fall another 100 to 150 basis points in Q2.

“Consumers adapted to the new stay-at-home mandates and the company adjusted its merchandising, programming and marketing to better meet the needs of its customers,” Wintermantel wrote. “That said, the product margin pressure due to category mix shifts continued and [Qurate] is incurring further COVID-related costs — including additional pay, reduced productivity in its fulfillment centers, which is leading to increased fulfillment times and additional bad debt reserves (in anticipation of the deteriorating economic situation).” 

While the COVID-19 crisis has opened up a number of opportunities for home shopping and e-commerce, it has also upended operations and created a number of problems both for networks and brands.

One issue is financial: Reports from some companies show they’ve taken a fiscal hit as they’ve moved from the higher-margin merchandise featured in pre-pandemic shows to less profitable home-oriented products that are popular with viewers subject to stay-at-home orders.

In other cases, companies have had to shut down studios and use remote production technologies to create content from on-air personalities’ homes. Amazon and others have also reported supply disruptions and increased costs to protect workers and clean facilities.

Univision, for example, stopped its “Gangas & Deals” segment on Despierta America for two weeks to rethink the product line and make the segments more relevant to viewers during the pandemic, Univision Local Media senior VP of growth initiatives John Buergler said. The retooled segments have since returned to the air.

Companies also have been trying to assist with COVID-19 relief. Qurate Retail, for example, has committed $29 million to pandemic-related efforts.

Networks and e-commerce players have also been working closely with brands that face their own challenges. For instance, ABC’s Good Morning America began focusing on small businesses in early March in its “Deals & Steals” segments and, by early May, had featured more than 150 small businesses.

“Most of the businesses we’ve featured have told me definitively that our segment saved jobs by providing that much-needed shot in the arm,” said Tory Johnson, the e-commerce editor on GMA’s “Deals & Steals” features. “Some have said they could not survive without our segment.”

RELATED: Pandemic Changes the Home Shopping Mix

Others also see opportunities to work with emerging brands on their e-commerce efforts. Josh Feldman, executive VP and head of marketing and advertising creative at NBCUniversal, said the new NBCU Checkout system has the potential of being particularly appealing to smaller brands.

“It doesn’t require a traditional media schedule or for them to be traditional national TV advertisers,” he said. “It is a new business model that can work for the smallest sort of brand to the largest.”

To encourage smaller brands to participate, Feldman said, “we are waiving all of our percentage of cart fees on any piece of shoppable branded content or ShoppableTV opportunities.”

Working with smaller and emerging brands can also be beneficial to both parties, Knocking CEO Markus Reinmund said, because many of these newer brands have fascinating stories to tell.

“When content is done poorly it looks like someone is just pitching a product,” Reinmund said. “We want to sell products, but it is much more effective if you can tell a story that engages consumers about someone who had a great idea and is bringing it to the market.”

HSN Inc. shareholders will gather Dec. 29 at the home shopping giant’s St. Petersburg, Fla., headquarters for a special meeting to approve its $2.6 billion merger with QVC Inc. parent Liberty Interactive, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Monday.

Liberty first announced the all-stock deal in July, where Liberty Interactive would acquire the 62% of HSN it doesn’t already own. The company plans to keep its HSN and QVC brands separate.

The deal is still subject to federal regulatory approvals. Liberty has said it expects the transaction to be completed by the end of the year.

According to the deal each HSN stockholder will receive 1.65 shares of Liberty Interactive's Series A QVC Group common stock for each share of HSN common stock they own.

According to the prospectus, Liberty Interactive will issue about 53.5 million shares of Liberty QVCA common stock to HSN shareholders, who would own about 11.1% of the equity and 7.2% of the voting power of Liberty Interactive's QVC Group tracking stock. Additionally, HSN shareholders would own about 6.2% of the Liberty Interactive voting power as a whole.

Over the past few years, digital technology has profoundly changed the home-shopping business, which not only appears to be surviving but, in many ways, is thriving despite radical changes in consumer-buying habits.

QVC, HSN and Evine Live have embraced e-commerce, with sales from digital platforms soaring to roughly half of their revenue. In fact, QVC and HSN ranked Nos. 8 and 19, respectively, this year in a list of the Top 25 e-commerce retailers compiled by eMarketer. And now, the products borne from the digital revolution — consumer electronics ranging from laptops to Fitbits — have supplanted jewelry as a key home-shopping product category.

As it turned out, the Internet didn’t kill home shopping. Instead, the major home-shopping channels stepped up to the plate with their websites and mobile apps; adjusted their mixes of merchandise to reflect the times; repurposed their TV content and created original programming for their digital platforms; and made aggressive, innovative forays into social media.

For the remainder of the year and going forward, executives at QVC, HSN and Evine said they will continue to make changes and find new ways to make buying on digital platforms more enticing and easy.

HSN, for example, will once again live-stream a fashion show featuring apparel from its celebrity vendor Serena Williams, with that event to take place later this month.

“Everything in the fashion show will be shoppable in the moment,” HSN president Bill Brand said.

QVC’s efforts have included launching an all-digital network — Beauty IQ, available on QVC.com — and experimenting with Facebook Live. And Evine is focusing on making its online checkout process as consumer-friendly as possible, as well as following the example of its two larger competitors by finding success with celebrity vendors, including Southern chef Paula Deen and actress-singer Vanessa Williams.

QVC, HSN and Evine say that these kinds of initiatives, as well as their ability to be nimble to adjust to consumer trends, have given them an advantage in a brutal retail environment. It’s a landscape in which brick-and-mortar companies are announcing store closings or filing for Chapter 11 protection, and one where Amazon.com appears to have changed shopping habits forever. QVC, HSN and Evine Live maintain the relationships they’ve forged with their longtime customers — who unabashedly enjoy shopping — through the networks’ vendors and hosts will also help them weather the storm.

“We were always part of a shopping experience that was best had outside of the traditional brick-and-mortar environment,” Doug Rose, QVC senior vice president of brand and communications, said.

And now those “super-engaged consumers” can shop online — on a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone — for any product 24/7, according to Brand.

That is not to say that home-shopping networks haven’t been buffeted by the changing retail climate. In the second quarter, QVC’s domestic network saw revenue increase 2% to $1.4 billion, but CEO Mike George warned that sales had tailed off the end of the quarter. HSN’s net sales slipped 3% from the prior year to $557.2 million, and Evine Live saw a similar dip, down 2% to $157 million.

But home-shopping network officials said their companies are better equipped to buck the negative trends in part by swiftly adjusting their on-air and digital offerings in a way that, in their view, traditional retailers cannot.

“We are so flexible we can go where the customers are taking us,” Rose said. “You’ll see us shifting airtime and resources and digital space to categories that are really responding and we’ll shift them away from ones that are not doing as well.”

DIGITAL REVOLUTION

In the second quarter, QVC’s digital sales increased to 51% of revenue, to $727 million, with mobile making up 57% of that, according to QVC’s parent, Liberty Interactive.

“People who like shopping for discovery like to fit it into the margins of their day, and so, when they’re grabbing a cup of coffee in line in Starbucks, they’re going to open up their app and they’re going to see what’s on QVC today,” Rose said.

Home-shopping networks were well-positioned to take advantage of the e-commerce boom. Digital made it easy for shoppers to buy merchandise from the networks’ vast inventories of product, even when it wasn’t being shown on-air. And QVC, HSN and Evine also had distribution systems in place to get goods directly to consumers.

In addition, the networks could post video from their telecasts online with products.

“Most brick-and-mortar retailers don’t have the internal structure to do all this kind of production,” Nicole Ostoya, Evine’s chief marketing officer, said. “It takes years producing 24/7. We’re making content and it’s taken all of these years to hone this skill.”

Officials at all three of the major home shopping networks say that their strategy is to tell viewers the interesting stories behind the brands and products they sell, and the people behind them, and video lets them do that online.

Today, these networks say that they are continuing to fine-tune their online experience for shoppers.

While some retailers viewed e-commerce and mobile “as something of a disruptive factor, we look at [them] as a unique opportunity,” Rose said.

Digital sales are also skyrocketing at HSN, making up 46-47% of its business, according to Brand. He said that his network’s most valuable customers shop across all of its platforms.

“I’ve had to really pivot this business to be sure that we’re building an experience that’s based in content but is seamless and frictionless across every single device,” he said. “The iPhone only came out in ’07 … and now smartphones and tablets make up 50% of all of our digital sales.”

On the mobile front, the focus at HSN is “on optimization,” making that experience as strong and consumer-friendly as possible, Brand said. And as a result of growing demand on digital, HSN has widened it online product assortment, particularly in the beauty category, according to Brand, “because our customers want great product when they want it, and that’s what digital provides.”

The third-largest home shopping network is officially named Evine Live, but on-air it has dropped the “Live” and refers to itself as just “Evine” because of its digital presence, Ostoya said.

“We think that Evine is cleaner and easier to understand,” she said. “A lot of places that people experience us — online, on our app — the content isn’t live, so it felt like [Evine Live] wasn’t exactly right.”

In the second quarter, the company reported about half of its sales are online, and 50% of those are actually done by mobile, Ostoya said.

“But a big piece of that is driven by what’s on-air,” she said. “What we’re finding is a lot of customers still see what we’re selling on the TV but instead of calling, they do the quick checkout on their second screen … So we have a really nice healthy online business, but there is that chunk that’s driven by what’s on TV.”

Like its larger competitors, Evine has been tweaking the content it offers online, and has new initiatives in the works for unique online content, according to Ostoya.

“In the old home-shopping/online world, we would just take our shows and repurpose them on the Web,” she said.

Now Evine is editing down 10-minute segments to two minutes for the Web, to make it more convenient for consumers, Ostoya said.

Evine is also working to ease the process for checking out and purchasing items online, and plans a total overhaul of its website next year under the guidance of its newly named chief digital officer, Macy’s veteran Sunil Verma, Ostoya said.

THE AMAZING GORILLA

E-commerce giant Amazon has been a disrupter, luring shoppers away from brickand- mortar retailers. This year, it also escalated efforts to sell apparel — a key category for home shopping — launching a live show called Style Code Live featuring clothes available on Amazon.

Rose and Brand said that while their home-shopping customers buy some goods on Amazon, the monster website doesn’t have the allure and attributes that attract many shoppers to HSN and QVC. Amazon’s emergence more than 20 years ago “has been wind on our back,” Rose said, “because for that entire time what it, in effect, did was help bring more and more people into the behavior of shopping remotely.”

But Amazon really just represents “a search-driven experience if you know what looking for and you are just trying to avoid running an errand,” according to Rose.

“Amazon is kind of the elephant in the room in retail right now,” HSN’s Brand said. “And they’re doing an amazing job of delivering product purely from a commodity standpoint ... Our point of differentiation comes through products you can’t find anywhere else, the content and the personalities [on the network], and the relationships.”

Some 75% of the merchandise HSN sells can’t be bought elsewhere, and popular vendors such as celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck and veteran host Colleen Lopez have loyal followings, according to Brand.

“Those relationships even in the toughest retail environment help us pull through,” he said, adding that shoppers don’t have a relationship with a search engine.

Ostoya described Amazon as “an incredible force in the marketplace” that is affecting everyone.

“Where we stand apart is Amazon is still a 2D experience: you can click on it, you can zoom in,” she said. “I know that they started Style Code, but they don’t quite understand the science that we understand about home shopping … They don’t understand that you have to get the information out clearly [about merchandise] right away ... They’re doing kind of a talk show. That’s not commerce shopping.”

SHAKING UP THE MIX

It’s an outdated notion that QVC and HSN are largely purveyors of cubic zirconia jewelry. With the explosion of consumer-electronics products, driven in good part by the Internet, QVC and HSN have diversified far beyond from jewelry sales in recent years and shifted their product mixes to include consumer electronics as common as tablets to newer wares just coming to market.

“We had great success with Amazon and its Echo device,” Rose said. “Those kinds of emerging technologies are very demonstrable and that’s kind of our sweet spot … Products that we are constantly looking for are those that have great stories to tell, and they might actually struggle a bit in the absence of telling that story.”

QVC also believes its growing international footprint gave it an advantage in the retail and home-shopping arena for consumer electronics and other categories. That reach allowed it to afford brands such as Dyson virtually global distribution through its home-shopping channels in Europe and the Far East, Rose said.

Consumer electronics “continues to be a strong pillar” of HSN’s strategy, and the network has built strong relationships with companies such as HP and Samsung, according to Brand. The network also is partnering with exercise-electronics maker Fitbit on offerings.

HSN has become such a player in the consumer-electronics arena that the industry turns to the electronic retailer for marketing advice, according to Brand.

“And the reason that the consumer-electronics business relies on us the way that they do is because of the understanding that we have of the female consumer,” he said. “It’s fascinating to go to [International] CES with our team and they rely on us to help them pick colors in laptops. Technology … is a big part of our business, but it’s also how women interact on social [media] and shop now.”

In contrast to QVC and HSN, Evine’s major product category remains jewelry and watches, Ostoya said. While the network has diversified its merchandise mix, it pulled back on the consumer-electronics segment last quarter and is retooling efforts “because we weren’t doing it well,” Ostoya said.

There’s a lot of potential in electronics because Evine hosts and expert vendors can explain all the benefits and features of a product on-air more skillfully than an untrained teen salesperson at Best Buy, she said.

Evine Live, the former ShopHQ, said it has received notice from the NASDAQ that it has 180 days to get its stock price above $1 per share or risk being delisted from the stock exchange.

The notification is the latest in a series of setbacks for the company, which was the subject of a proxy fight in 2014 where one of its largest shareholders took control of the company and rearranged its management team.

In the past month, Evine’s CEO – former HSN executive Mark Bozek – resigned, replaced by chairman Bob Rosenblatt in the interim. EVP and chief strategy officer Russell Nuce also resigned.

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Evine revealed that Bozek, who left the company effective Feb. 8, received a severance package valued at more than $1.2 million.

Evine stock, once as high as $7 per share during the proxy battle, has been trading under $1 each since Feb. 5. The stock was trading at 82 cents each (up 6 cents) in early trading Wednesday.

According to an SEC filing, Evine received notification from NASDAQ about its non-compliance on March 21. In accordance with NASDAQ rules it has 180 days, or until Sept. 19, to regain compliance, which would mean the stock has to trade above $1 per share for a minimum of 10 consecutive business days. If it does not reach that level by the Sept. 19 deadline, Evine could be eligible for an extension, but would be required to transfer from the NASDAQ Global Market exchange to the NASDAQ Capital Market exchange and meet all the necessary requirements. If it still fails to meet the Exchange’s standards, then the stock would be subject to delisting.

Evine also reported fourth quarter results, with revenue up 5% $212 million but cash flow down 29% to just $4.9 million in the period. For the full year, revenue increased 3% to $693.3 million while cash flow was down 60% to $9.2 million.

“Although the company had solid revenue growth in the fourth quarter, we are disappointed with the overall bottom line results,” Rosenblatt said in a statement. “The profit erosion that continued into our fourth quarter doesn’t reflect the merchandising balance and operational discipline necessary to deliver consistent growth in value to all stakeholders. We are in the midst of implementing plans to address these issues, but we are mindful that it will take some time to fix them in the right way. Last week we took our first steps toward addressing these issues and cut our full-year operating expense by $5 million through a reduction in corporate overhead and other operating costs.”

Rosenblatt continued, “Evine Live has a proven business model and we are strongly positioned to continue to use our expertise as a leader in the digital video commerce space.  Our historical focus on developing proprietary and exclusive brands to broaden our product offering is proving to be a good idea. However, it is only one piece of a much broader business strategy that is required to create profitable results and to build shareholder value. Our work going forward is centered on building a cohesive merchandising strategy with clear accountability. With the $17 million bank term loan from GACP Finance Co., LLC, our recently strengthened balance sheet provides the Company some additional flexibility in building long-term relationships with our vendors, as well as the ability to be more opportunistic in the broader marketplace.”

About five months after a proxy battle that ousted its management and revamped its board of directors, home shopping giant ValueVision Media has changed its name to Evine Live, in an effort to better reflect its transformation into a comprehensive digital commerce company.

ValueVision made the announcement in conjunction with releasing with its third quarter earnings results on Nov. 18. As part of the transition, the company changed its trading symbol on the NASDAQ Exchange from VVTV to EVLV on Nov. 20.

The company said the name change is part of the ongoing effort to transform Evine Live into a true digital commerce company.

After years of sluggish performance, ValueVision Media emerged in June from a proxy fight that saw it jettison its top management and most of its board in favor of a slate of directors with varied and vast experience in retail, television production and cable. CEO Mark Bozek, a 20-year veteran of the home-shopping wars — he started as an executive at QVC in 1994 — and a former CEO of HSN, joined a slate of high-profile directors put forth by activist investor The Clinton Group to shake up the company.  

According to a company statement, the "Es" that bookend the Evine Live brand represent the ease, exclusivity and energy of what it calls a new entertaining consumer experience. The inclusion of the word "Live" is about real-time impulses to act and interact on all digital platforms.

ValueVision acquired the Evine brand as part of a $1 million stock deal to acquire Dollars Per Minute, a Huntington, N.Y. based merchandising and entertainment company created by Bozek and Russell Nuce. Evine said it has named Nuce as its new chief strategy officer.

According to Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Nuce will receive annual compensation of about $375,000, a signing bonus of $75,000 and a one-time bonus of $176,000. Bozek receives total annual compensation of about $1.3 million.

As part of the Dollars Per Minute transaction, former ValueVision independent board member Thom Beers, CEO of FremantleMedia North America, received stock worth $532,867 as payment for certain convertible bridge notes he held in the company.

“As a result of the consummation of the transaction, the company’s board of directors has determined that Mr. Beers will no longer serve as an independent director,” Evine said in an SEC filing, “…and at this time, will no longer be a member of the company’s corporate governance and nominating committee.”

The rebranding is in line with what The Clinton Group had promised during their fight for control of ValueVision -- transforming what has been a distant third in the homme shopping wars (behnd QVC Group and HSN) into a modern, streamlined and nimble competitor.

"On the heels of a solid third quarter, we strongly believe definitive change and innovation are necessary to build on our recent momentum and drive the company to the next level," Bozek said in a statement. "We believe that fully embracing this new transformation will enable Evine Live to forge new paths and new relationships that allow us to be far more competitive, far more creative, and far more disruptive on all our platforms. Evine Live has the opportunity to be fearless in our strategies to transform the worlds of retail and entertainment while, at the same time, driving greater consumer engagement."

The company expects to transition from doing business as "ShopHQ" to "Evine Live" over the coming months, with the complete rebranding planned to take place first half of 2015. In the coming months, the company intends to introduce new proprietary brands from the worlds of fashion, beauty, jewelry, home and fitness.

"The new approach should enable us to build a stronger foundation for long-term growth," Bozek added in a statement.