Best Buy will make creator storefronts its new points of sale

Best Buy is partnering with influencers to launch a feature that looks to spruce up the brand’s digital shelves. The new storefronts will provide creators with space they can use to recommend products they endorse.

The announcement of the creator shelves came during Best Buy’s earnings call for the fourth quarter of the 2025 fiscal year. Like many U.S.-based companies, the electronics chain is bracing for the economic impact of President Trump’s proposed tariffs. The resulting rocky outlook contributed to Best Buy’s post-earings market slide.

For the beleaguered retailer, which now operates fewer than 1,000 brick-and-mortar stores in the United States, the creator economy offers potential gains amidst adverse economic conditions. During the earnings call, Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said the upcoming storefronts will debut on the Best Buy website sometime in the spring.

Barry described the program as a play that will drive traffic, engagement, and sales for Best Buy. A representative for the brand did not offer further details when contacted by Modern Retail.

Forbes noted that Best Buy already attempted to launch a digital marketplace in 2011. Though that effort failed, the ecommerce industry is currently drawing major interest from investors and consumers, giving Best Buy a chance to see if the second attempt goes better than the first.

The rise of creator-curated recommendations is both a challenge and an opportunity for Best Buy. Consumers — especially those in the Millennial, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha cohorts — trust influencers when choosing what to buy. Through partnerships with those individuals, Best Buy can reach a keyed-in audience that boasts significant purchasing power.

But if creators are the new tech experts, where does that leave entities like Best Buy’s blue-shirted associates, which long served as the chain’s source of quality recs? In recent years, Best Buy has aligned itself with creators like Marques Brownlee, signaling in the process that its decision-makers understand the changing nature of product reviews.

Other retailers are looking in the other direction: While they make affiliate marketing deals with creators, they are also turning their own employees into influencers. Walmart launched a notable experiment in that area with its Spotlight venture, and Dick’s Sporting Goods is going public with its internal influencer program.

That seems like one potential endgame for Best Buy’s creator storefronts. Generating affiliate marketing revenue is good, but imagine if Best Buy could transform its employees into a collective of tech creators. That would give it an in to a community it desperately wants to reach.