1. What strategy did QVC use, and how did it support this strategy?
2. What challenges does QVC face? How has it confronted them so far?

QVC was the leader in the home shopping market. It regularly shipped over 170 million products annually to its customers, resulting in almost $8.8 million in sales. By its initials alone, QVC promised that it would deliver quality, value, and convenience to its viewers. Founded by Joseph Segel in 1986, it had grown quickly to overtake rival Home Shopping Network by focusing on product variety, reliability, and excellent customer service. By concentrating on offering proprietary products endorsed by celebrities and combining this with money-back guarantees and extended-pay credit programs, Segel grew QVC to the position of industry leader. Since then, leadership passed to current president and CEO of QVC, Michael George, but the company’s growth continued unabated. By 2014 its reach extended to almost 300 million households all over the world, and more than three-quarters of the shopping channel’s customers had given it a score of 7 out of 7 for trustworthiness.

The success of QVC had been largely driven by its popular television home shopping shows that featured a wide variety of eye-catching products, many of which were unique to the channel. In 1995, QVC launched its own retail website to complement its television home shopping channel. By 2015 this website had attracted more than 7 million unique monthly visitors, making it one of the leading multimedia retailers. Building on this, the firm had created a family of mobile shopping applications for smartphones and tablets. Although QVC was still developing this segment, mobile applications were already accounting for almost one-third of its sales. This allowed QVC to continue to offer much higher margin products to both existing and new markets.

QVC realized the challenges of growing its market share and was always looking for new ways to improve its services and generate a competitive edge. In 2012 it acquired e-commerce shipping site Send the Trend, and launched a joint venture in China. In 2013 it launched QVC Plus as a second channel in the U.S. and in 2014 announced the launch of a channel in France to add to its reach into countries such as United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and Italy. QVC believed it still had a lot of room to grow; the question remained whether it would be able to sustain a competitive advantage that was not only unique and valuable but also difficult for competitors to imitate or substitute.