Independent appliance dealers ended last year in roaring fashion, pulling off one of their best performances of the past few years during the Black Friday promotional event. Unfortunately, that momentum didn’t carry over into the new year and the MLK Day promotional period, according to Nationwide Marketing Group’s latest holiday retail report, powered by PriMetrix. While the three-week sales event did see a 0.7 percent increase in total volume compared to last year, unit sales were down 7.5 percent.
Another sign of the period’s sluggishness was the amount of duress shopping that occurred. Throughout much of 2024, NMG dealers saw duress purchases account for around 60-65 percent of all sales during any given promotional period. That number swelled to 70 percent for this first sales event of 2025. Of the single-item sales, laundry lead the way with 29 percent share, followed by refrigerators at 27 percent, dishwashers at 23 percent, and cooking at 20 percent.
Looked at collectively, dishwashers and refrigerators did see strong dollars performance during the promo event, rising 3.4 percent and 3.1 percent respectively over last year. Still, both were down 3.7 percent in unit sales.
In what’s becoming a consistent theme from promo period to promo period, data showed that NMG dealers leveraging the group’s digital tools outperformed both the industry and prior-year results.
Retailers on the NMG OneShop platform saw major increases, year-over-year, in the average number of e-commerce orders (up 29.7 percent), average e-commerce revenue (up 72.6 percent), and average e-commerce ticket size (up 34.4 percent). In addition, dealers who leaned into vendor-sponsored campaign opportunities saw gains in total impressions (up 71 percent to more than 31.5 million) and average click through rate (up 57 percent), while the average cost per click fell off by 32 percent (a good thing!).
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