Survey: RadioShack's In Big Trouble - No Wonder Amazon Is Raising Prices
According to a DealNews survey, RadioShack's troubles are far from over.
RadioShack recently announced that it was closing 1,100 stores around the country, and soon after, Amazon announced a price increase on its Amazon Prime subscriptions. If DealNews's (unscientific) survey of its readers its correct, Amazon has nothing to worry from the 80s electronics retail relic.
DealNews asked their readers a few questions about RadioShack, like what they bought at RadioShack in the past year and how they made those purchases, and the results are not good for the struggling company.
According to DealNews, 41 percent of their readership went to RadioShack last year to buy generally cheap electronics accessories, like cables, smartphone chargers, memory cards, cases, and batteries. Another 32 percent said they went to "The Shack" to buy "hobby electronics" like soldering irons, capacitors and other do it yourself widgets. Only 6 percent went for small electronics, like cameras and tablets, with another 6 percent visiting RadioShack for a phone. Finally, 2 percent went there for big home electronics purchases like televisions or speaker systems, and no one said they purchased computers from the retailer.
Basically, as we mentioned before, when RadioShack announced it was closing a fifth of its physical retail locations in an effort to cut costs and turn around the struggling company, the main things people buy there are widgets and accessories -- something which Amazon can often offer at much cheaper prices and with much larger selection. It seems no one is going to the retailer for their next big tech purchase.
To make matters worse, when asked how they bought products at RadioShack, 90 percent of DealNews's respondents said they did it in-store, with a miniscule 3 percent saying they went to RadioShack's online site. This is also bad news for the future of RadioShack, as more retail traffic in tech moves online.
It's simply a terrible place to start building from. For example, as we previously reported, office supply and electronics retailer Staples made a similar announcement about closing retail locations the day after RadioShack, but also said it was continually making moves in its online store, which should double in size by the end of the year.
It appears RadioShack is not primed to do that, as over half of the survey's respondents said they only made the RadioShack purchases (same-day, in-store) in the case of an emergency or "last minute." The majority of preplanned tech purchases are probably going to Amazon, as well as other sites online, instead of RadioShack's virtual store -- especially because the main complaint for RadioShack is reportedly that the prices are too high.
Since this was a survey of readers of a deals website, the sample of over 2,000 respondents is undoubtedly skewed towards the deal-savvy. But if this only even represents people looking for low prices, RadioShack is still in trouble.
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