By focusing on retail marketing at the heart of its strategy, Best Buy is fusing social commerce, creator monetization, and retail media into a single ecosystem, positioning itself as a next-generation marketplace for products and influence.
The consumer electronics giant is making a clear pivot from traditional retail to platform-powered commerce through influencer storefronts, integrated retail media, and a growing third-party digital marketplace.
At a time when customer acquisition costs are rising and digital attention is fragmented, Best Buy is rewriting the retail marketing playbook, making inspiration shoppable, creators powerful partners, and every touchpoint a potential revenue stream.
Social Selling at Scale: From Influence to Checkout
With the Best Buy Creator Program launch, the company is doing more than working with influencers: it’s giving them real estate on its platform. Influencers of all sizes can now curate shoppable storefronts featuring products they use and recommend. Shoppers can move seamlessly from social inspiration to checkout, and creators earn commission on all referred purchases, with no earnings cap.
Best Buy isn’t just leveraging creators for reach, it’s enabling them to become distribution channels. The move mirrors Amazon’s influencer storefronts and TikTok Shop’s model, but with a tech-focused twist: content creators specializing in consumer electronics and innovation naturally fit Best Buy’s customer base. Early adopters include prominent tech influencers like Linus Tech Tips and Jenna Ezarik.
As CMO Jennie Weber put it, the goal is to turn authenticity into retail experience, making inspiration fun, trackable, and, critically, profitable.
Platform Thinking: Owning the End-to-End Value Chain
Best Buy’s broader transition to a platform model underpins the Creator Program. Scheduled to launch in summer 2025, Best Buy Marketplace will allow third-party sellers to list products directly on BestBuy.com and its mobile app. The company is partnering with Mirakl, a leading digital marketplace provider, to enable seamless seller onboarding and operations.
However, the real differentiation lies in Best Buy’s ability to offer omnichannel tools, from inventory drops to in-house advertising via Best Buy Ads. Marketplace sellers won’t just be selling; they’ll be able to access curated promotional opportunities, participate in campaigns, and leverage Best Buy’s fulfillment and audience reach.
It’s a significant departure from traditional retail marketing: Best Buy is becoming a commerce platform, competing not just with Amazon or Walmart, but also attracting niche brands looking to scale with credibility and infrastructure.
The Retail Media Flywheel: From Audience to Ad Network
Few retailers understand their tech-savvy customers better than Best Buy, which boasts over 3 billion annual interactions across digital and physical touchpoints. With that data, it launched Best Buy Ads, an in-house media network in 2022. Now, it’s taking retail media into new territory with Social+, a platform connecting first-party customer data with social ad placements on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram.
Through Meta’s Advantage+ shopping campaigns, advertisers can target Best Buy customers with SKU-level precision. It’s a triple win: advertisers gain targeting accuracy, creators monetize their influence, and Best Buy increases basket size while owning the end-to-end advertising funnel.
Best Buy partnered with Roku, Criteo, and DoubleVerify to extend its retail media capabilities across streaming and cross-platform campaigns. Now with Social+, it blurs the line between retail media and social commerce, enabling brand partners to be discoverable wherever attention resides.
A New Model for Customer-Led Growth
Best Buy’s strategy signals a powerful trend: merging community, commerce, and content into a single ecosystem. The retailer is not just adopting tools – it’s creating a cohesive growth engine that connects:
- Influence (via creators)
- Commerce (via storefronts and marketplace)
- Media (via Best Buy Ads and Social+)
This isn’t incremental innovation; it’s structural. By turning its site into a destination for creators, brands, and third-party sellers, Best Buy is building a retail marketing operating system, not just a store.
At a time when trust in ads is low and customer acquisition is costly, Best Buy is letting others sell on its behalf, but on its terms, with its data, and through its platform.
The implications for retail marketing are profound. The battle is no longer for shelf space—it’s for influence, integration, and infrastructure. Best Buy is betting that the future belongs to those who can offer all three.
Shoppable Content: The Future
Best Buy’s strategy shows that content (when personalized, social, and frictionless) doesn’t just drive inspiration; it drives conversion. Shoppable videos and landing pages by Publitas make inspiration actionable, letting shoppers buy directly from engaging videos or curated pages while reducing the friction between viewing and buying, especially on mobile.
Best Buy’s pivot is about more than selling products. It’s about owning the entire value chain—from where inspiration starts (content) to where purchase happens (e-commerce) to how visibility is funded (ads). This platform thinking elevates Best Buy from a retailer to a commerce engine…and we’re thinking along the same lines! Your catalog will soon become the canvas where media and commerce can meet, laying the foundation for publishing creator-like content with full visibility and attribution.
In the long term, it opens the door to retail media monetization (e.g., product placements, embedded ads, influencer partnerships), similar to what Best Buy is doing with “Best Buy Ads.”
Our shoppable videos and landing pages aren’t just a feature but a strategic enabler that helps retail brands transition to this new model without rebuilding their tech stack or hiring influencers.
