The lesson: QVC Group’s Chapter 11 filing on April 16 offers a stark lesson in why retailers must stay agile amid rapidly shifting market conditions. The company’s failure to broaden its core audience led to its current challenges.

The context: QVC pioneered the concept of shopping via a screen. Its first broadcast aired in November 1986, reaching 7.6 million cable homes across 20 states, and the concept quickly took hold.

By the mid-2010s, QVC had become a powerful platform, helping brands such as SPANX and bareMinerals gain traction through its reach of more than 100 million US households and presence in eight other countries. After acquiring longtime rival HSN in 2017, its annual revenues reached $14.07 billion the following year.

But after peaking at $14.18 billion in 2020, revenues have been on a downward trajectory—falling to $9.23 billion last year—that closely tracked the rise in cord-cutting. The company’s stock has plunged more than 99% since August 2021, when it benefited from a pandemic-era boom.

Why did this happen? Cord-cutting accelerated faster than QVC anticipated. While ecommerce sales grew to $5.2 billion, or roughly 63% of revenues last year, it wasn’t enough to offset losses from its TV channel. Nor did QVC use its digital presence to expand its audience: 97% of 2025 sales came from repeat buyers, even as its active customer base shrank from 8.1 million in 2023 to about 7 million by September 2025.

It isn’t that QVC didn’t see the shift; in 2022 it announced it was reinventing itself as a “live social shopping company,” and last year it partnered with TikTok Shop and set a goal of generating $1.5 billion in run-rate revenues from social platforms within three years. But it largely failed to adjust its approach to appeal to younger consumers. In 2024, nearly three-quarters of QVC shoppers were women over 50, with an average age near 60. That enabled other platforms—including TikTok Shop and Whatnot—to own more of the fast-growing US livestream retail ecommerce market, which we expect to more than double by 2029.