QVC’s parent company Liberty Interactive is acquiring online shopping site Zulily for $2.4 billion. Liberty Interactive’s CEO said the Zulily team built an “impressive business around entertainment, discovery and value to the customer,” which he said fits perfectly with the QVC philosophy between the two companies.
“Combined under Liberty, we have an incredible opportunity to delight shoppers from the TV to the Internet,” Greg Maffei said.
In fact, the words “entertainment,” “discovery,” and “value” were repeated in the press release announcing the deal, making it clear the companies believe there is a shared philosophy.
“While QVC and zulily will be operated as separate consumer facing brands, the collaboration creates numerous exciting opportunities, including leveraging QVC’s global scale, curation, vendor relationships and video commerce expertise at zulily. Similarly, zulily’s younger customer demographic, personalization expertise and eCommerce capabilities will boost QVC.”
The Wall Street Journal called Zulily a “flash-sales pioneer that has struggled recently with slowing sales gains.” The newspaper also said prominent shareholders including Alibaba Group would profit from the sale.
