Forget Cord Cutters. QVC Lives On

The king of cable home shopping wants to become the Netflix of retailing

- Gerry Smith

Standing next to a clothing rack on a TV studio set in West Chester, Pa., Pat James-Dementri, a host on home shopping channel QVC, urges viewers not to wait to buy a blouse and tank top set. Order now, she says, and get 30 percent off. Then she translates the price into the channel’s signature math: “Three easy pays of $16.66.” That folksy, old-school style of selling, used by the company since its founding in 1986, is burned into the memories of many people who haven’t shopped the channel in decades. A recent Philadelphia magazine article described QVC fans, for instance, as “silver-haired grannies ordering slow cookers and vibrating belly bands from landline phones.”

Yet QVC isn’t that cable shopping channel anymore. About half its sales occur online, and two-thirds of those are on mobile devices. After completing a $2.1 billion purchase of rival Home Shopping Network in January, QVC Group is the third-largest e-commerce company selling products in multiple categories in North America, trailing only Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc., according to researcher Internet Retailer. Wall Street has noticed, with shares of QVC’s owner, John Malone’s Liberty Interactive Corp., soaring 45 percent in the past year.