Home Furnishings Business' 6th Annual Power 50 Retailers

December 12, 2016  by Jane Chero in Industry, Special Events   

The industry has progressed for another year.  The year, 2016, was quite different from 2015, as the industry slowed its growth to under 4%.  No matter the change, we believe certain key factors remain important in measuring the strength of a retailer.  The key methodology is presented below:

Market Share – 46 percent

The estimated industry sales from various published sources for each retailer is divided by the estimated retail volume for furniture and bedding sales in each of the markets in which they participate, whether Metropolitan Statistical Area, Micro Statistical Area, or Rural.  Sales of appliances, electronics, and housewares are excluded.

Revenue – 20 percent

This category is based on estimated industry sales for each retailer based upon public published records or estimates based on certain retail parameters.

Retail Expansion – 15 percent

This category measures both store expansion and market expansion.  The new stores or new markets are based upon public records.

Social Engagement – 19 percent

This year’s index considers social signals, website metrics, and third party scoring platforms to arrive at a ranked list of home furnishings retailers with the strongest online engagement.

First, we pulled data from Alexa, Facebook, MOZ, OpenSEO, Twitter, and Pinterest for the retailers in our database.  The following shows the specific measurements:

                Source                                  Metric

                Alexa                                     US

                Facebook                            Check ins, Likes, Talking About

                MOZ                                      DomAuth, External Links, MozRank

                OpenSEO                             Google BackLinks, Google Page Rank, Google+ Likes

                Twitter                                 Followers, Likes, Tweets

                Pinterest                             Pins, Followers

 

You will note that there were additions and deletions to the factors used.  Specifically:

Retail Expansion – A major strategic element today is retailers adding new stores within their markets and expanding beyond their markets.

Industry Involvement – While impacting many retailers, the top performers belong to an association or buying group, resulting in little change in the performance ranking.

Social Media – Pinterest was added in recognition of its increased importance to communication with the consumer.  Klout score was removed.

From that data, we used a basic ranking methodology, assigning a numerical value to the ranked list of each metrics.  We assigned a one for each record within a specific metric, with one being the “best” score for the highest number of Twitter followers or the highest number of backlinks or the highest Pinterest score.

For all measurements except Alexa, the highest values resulted in a lower score, i.e. the highest Google Page Rank would result in the lowest score.  Alexa ranks websites globally and nationally based on estimated website traffic, and the lower the score, the more popular the site.

Thus we arrived at 14 individual scores calculated for each metric.  The highest two scores for each retailer were dropped to eliminate any outliers and then, we took the statistical average of those 12 scores.  Ranking the scores from lowest to highest created the Power 50 Online Engagement Index for 2016.

Enjoy the lists.