Like Walmart, Best Buy is taking pages out of Amazon’s e-commerce playbook

Additionally, as the third-party sellers create new advertising opportunities, Barry said the company sees fiscal 2026 as a pivotal year for the advertising business.

“We believe that as the trusted leader in [consumer electronics], we have an opportunity to leverage our positioning and assets to build a differentiated digital marketplace platform,” she said. “This will allow us to bring our customers access to a much more expansive assortment and new categories without needing to own the inventory. In addition, sellers and advertisers will have an additional avenue to increase their reach and build their brands, leveraging our qualified traffic.”

The Best Buy marketplace is taking shape

Barry shared new details about the upcoming marketplace. She said Best Buy will apply many of the things it has learned from its third-party marketplace in Canada. The retailer’s Canadian business has operated a marketplace since 2016 operated by tech company Mirakl, which will also handle the U.S. counterpart.

Like Walmart, the company will allow shoppers to make marketplace product returns to stores at launch. That’s not the case in Canada, where products cannot be returned to stores and must be delivered back to sellers by mail.

And like Amazon and Walmart, Best Buy will add a fulfillment service for sellers in a later phase.

Further, Barry said the U.S. marketplace will focus less on refurbished goods already present on the U.S. marketplace and more on deepening its assortment of new products. In Canada, the marketplace leaned more toward refurbished electronics.

“By offering this deeper selection of products, you can capture latent demand that you hadn’t been able to before because you were so worried about having all of that inventory on hand,” Barry said, adding this was a lesson learned from the Canadian business. “We’re trading notes back and forth, and I think that’s been a really helpful piece of the puzzle in terms of how we have prioritized the experiences that we think will matter most in our marketplace here.”

Megan Potts, founder of Triforce Digital Partners, an agency that specializes in non-Amazon marketplaces like those from Target, Walmart, Wayfair and Home Depot, said a couple of non-electronics brands she works with were recently approved to sell on the new Best Buy marketplace including a furniture brand and one that sells educational flash cards.

She said some brands have yet to realize that they may be a fit for Best Buy’s marketplace even if they don’t sell electronics. “That’s when we explain to them the vastness of that network and how loyal that Best Buy customer is,” Potts said. “There is a lot of excitement once we explain the extremely high site visit rate as well as conversion rates and loyalty.”

Even so, Potts still has unanswered questions, including how prominently marketplace items will be presented on the site.

“Every single channel is different and every single channel has different procedures — their algorithms are different, and their content formulas and style guides are different,” she said. “I’m very interested to see what that’s going to look like for Best Buy and what the testing is going to look like as we start to push content through.”

Best Buy is flexing its advertising muscles

Best Buy has about 100 million members across its free My Best Buy membership as well as the paid My Best Buy Plus and My Best Buy Total. It ended last year with almost 8 million paid members, up from 7 million the year before, Barry said. To compare, Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimates 180 million Amazon customers had a Prime membership as of March 2024, and Morgan Stanley pegs Walmart+ as having just over 26 million members.

Best Buy has long had an advertising business but relaunched it in 2022 as an in-house media company, Best Buy Ads, to target a greater variety of potential advertisers. This was around the same time retailers such as Lowe’s and grocery chain Albertson’s started launching their own retail media arms.

“We’ve had a robust retail media network business for a long time in partnership with our vendors. We are proud of this business we have built but see opportunity for further growth,” she said.

Last fall, Best Buy added longtime media and advertising leader Lisa Valentino, who previously worked for The Walt Disney Company, as president of its ads business. Best Buy is also working to fill other leadership roles and plans to open a New York office, according to Barry. Additionally, the company named David Kenny, who is also chairman of media analytics giant Nielsen Holdings, as its chairman last year.

“We are investing in capabilities that we believe will unleash growth, like competitive market-level self-service offerings that allow brands to manage their own advertising buys and new ad products that will expand inventory and customer reach,” Barry said, adding that the company also expects to build more agency partnerships to help add new advertisers and drive revenue growth.

Barry said the company plans on also focusing more on non-endemic growth areas, or products and services it doesn’t sell in its stores. Independent retail media analyst Andrew Lipsman said this could include entertainment, phone carriers and auto companies that would be of interest to Best Buy shoppers.

“They’re building these capabilities out from a really sturdy foundation with their ads business; they’ve been in retail media longer than almost anybody,” Lipsman said. “They’ve got one of the larger ad businesses already, they’re a category leader, and they still have some nice runway in front of them.”