Update 2: CircuitCity.com is back up and running.
Update: According to the Huffington Post, “Circuit City Stores Inc. hopes to sell its brand, trademarks and e-commerce business to Systemax Inc., the same company that purchased electronics retailer CompUSA’s intellectual property when it closed in 2008.”
Original Article: It was recently brought to public attention that the late Circuit City had a message on its site claiming that it would be re-opening online in “the coming weeks.” The message suggested that while its brick and mortar stores were gone, the company might continue as a web-only entity.
Commenting on Murdok, Doug Meacham of NextUp says:
Any relaunch of circuitcity.com will be in name only. As part of the liquidation of the corporation’s assets, the URL for the site was put up for sale. The change in messaging suggests that someone has purchased it. So to answer your question about what other plans Circuit City has up it’s sleeve, the answer is none because it no longer exists.
That may be the case, but the message seems to indicate that someone has plans for that brand/domain. Meg Marco at the Consumerist suggests, “Perhaps some poor fool has plans to buy the brand and open a web-only store— similar to what happened with CompUSA.”
Hitwise looks at who benefits the most from Circuit City’s absence. Not surprisingly, Best Buy, Walmart art, and Radio Shack are among the premiere beneficiaries. Take a look at Hitwise’s graphs:
Not that whoever re-opens (if they do) circuitcity.com won’t face stiff competition from sites like those mentioned above anyway, but Best Buy has recently launched an affiliate program/API initiative called Remix, which will put Best Buy products in a lot more places around the web. It’s going to be interesting to see if circuitcity.com can be resurrected to any significant degree of success. For the time being, I’m not even getting a page to load at the URL anymore.
