QVC Just Went Bankrupt. Here's Why That's Great News for You

In 2025, QVC sat on the single most valuable asset in retail. They were piped into 88 million households, they had decades of live selling expertise that every TikTok creator is now scrambling to learn, and they saw the live commerce wave coming years before anyone else did. Seven months later they filed for bankruptcy with over $6.6 billion in debt.

There is a specific mistake that pulled them under, and it has nothing to do with being slow, old, or missing the trend. It is the same thing killing thousands of ecommerce sellers right now, especially Amazon sellers who think they are safe. And the same thing that killed QVC is what makes this the best time I have seen in years to get into live selling.

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Table of Contents

Key takeaways

QVC filed Chapter 11 with $6.6 billion in debt after revenue fell from $10.9B in 2023 to $8.3B in 2025.
The real cause was the single-channel trap: 88 million households but zero customer relationships QVC actually owned.
Build an owned audience in parallel with any third-party platform, since email and SMS travel with you when the platform changes.
Live shopping converts at over 30% versus 2-3% for a traditional store, because trust is built before the sale starts.
Whole categories are wide open: home goods, tools, pet supplies, and books map almost perfectly to what QVC’s audience used to buy.

What actually happened to QVC

QVC filed Chapter 11 on April 16th with over $6.6 billion in debt, after revenue collapsed from $10.9 billion in 2023 to $8.3 billion in 2025 and net losses topped $2.1 billion. Revenue had already dropped to $10 billion in 2024 before falling again the next year, which is $2.6 billion gone in two years against a debt load they could not pay back. The filing came with a plan to slash that debt down to $1.3 billion and emerge within 90 days.

To understand how this happened, you have to understand what QVC was built on. They reach roughly 88 million American households through five television channels, and for decades the model was simple: get on cable, sell to the people watching, and build a base that comes back every week. It worked for a long time, and my own mom used to spend hundreds of dollars a week on the platform.

The problem is that cable has been dying for over a decade, and QVC’s core customer, people between 45 and 75, never converted over to live shopping apps. QVC’s own earnings reports warned about declining viewership every quarter for years. They knew, but they had no plan to rebuild the audience anywhere else, and by the time they tried, it was too late.

What is the single-channel trap that killed QVC?

The single-channel trap is building your entire operation on a distribution channel you do not own, do not control, and cannot survive without, and it is what killed QVC: 88 million households and zero customer relationships they actually owned. Every business I have watched fail from a platform change died for the same reason.

I watched it happen to my friend John Rampton, who I interviewed on my podcast. John was selling organizers and containers on Amazon and built it to a $9 million annual business. When one of his vendors started shipping late and running out of stock, Amazon’s system flagged the fulfillment issues, banned his account, and that was it.

Here is the part that mattered: John had no email list and no direct relationship with any of his customers. Every buyer was locked inside Amazon, so when his account got banned he could not reach a single one of them or even tell them where he went. Nine million dollars in annual revenue, gone overnight, because the customer relationship lived on a platform he did not own. QVC made the exact same mistake at ten billion dollars.

I lived through a version of this myself. When Google rolled out its Helpful Content update, it wiped out the organic traffic to my store’s blog almost overnight. Content that had driven consistent sales for years just stopped getting found, and friends running affiliate blogs almost entirely dependent on that traffic mostly never recovered.

The reason it did not destroy my business is simple: I had spent years building an email list alongside everything else. When the Google traffic disappeared, I kept selling to 100,000 people who had given me their address directly. Today over 60 percent of my revenue comes from owned channels, and that list is what carries the business through every change happening right now.

Same kind of platform shift that killed John, two completely different outcomes, and the only variable was whether the customer relationship lived somewhere I controlled.

This vulnerability is identical across every platform. An Amazon-only seller is one account ban, policy change, or category restriction away from being John Rampton. A Shopify-only seller is one Google algorithm update away from invisible. A TikTok creator is one ban away from starting over. The medium changes, but the trap is the same.

So always build your owned audience in parallel with whatever you are doing on a third-party platform, whether that is email, SMS, or a private community, something that lives off-platform and travels with you when things change. The platform is how you find the customer. The owned list is how you keep them.

What is replacing broadcast shopping

The model replacing broadcast shopping is built on one idea QVC never figured out: the audience shows up for you, not for the channel. QVC’s model was push distribution. You got on cable, you interrupted strangers who happened to have the television on, and you hoped enough of them bought before they changed the channel. Live commerce works the other way around, where you build a community around a category and sell to people who show up on purpose, specifically for you.

My friend Tiffany Ivanovsky runs a boutique clothing brand called Emma Lou’s Boutique, and she does over $40 million a year selling almost exclusively through live video. At the Sellers Summit, Tiffany did a live selling demo on stage alongside my wife, and in fifteen minutes, in front of 200 people, they sold over a thousand dollars worth of items she grabbed cold from sellers in the audience, products she had never touched or pitched before.

Because Tiffany had built such a loyal community, the product was almost beside the point. They were buying from her.

That is exactly why the conversion numbers look the way they do. A traditional Shopify store converts at 2 to 3 percent, while live shopping converts at over 30 percent, a ten-times improvement coming entirely from trust built before the sale started. This is already playing out at scale, with US live shopping sales reaching roughly $50 billion in 2025 and projected to grow another 36 percent by 2026, much of that growth coming from individual sellers with loyal audiences.

If you want to see where the US is headed, look at China, about five years further down this road. A single livestreamer named Li Jiaqi sold US$1.9 billion in goods on the first day of Singles’ Day pre-sales, and China’s live commerce market is now over $800 billion in gross merchandise value, with more than half the population having bought through a livestream.

How can ordinary people profit from live selling?

Ordinary people can profit right now because TikTok Shop, Whatnot, and YouTube Live are all actively incentivizing new live sellers, and the algorithms favor newcomers the same way TikTok rewarded new creators in 2020. This is the closest thing to TikTok in 2020 that I have seen. When TikTok was new, the platform needed content volume and rewarded new creators generously to get it, and the sellers who started then built audiences of hundreds of thousands without spending a dollar on ads.

The reason these platforms reward newcomers is the same one that drove TikTok early on: they need content volume, so the algorithm pushes new live sellers to get it. That will change eventually, but right now it is hot.

My friend Brandon Young recently started selling trading cards on Whatnot and is pulling in four to five hundred dollars an hour. The right platform depends on your product, and matching the category to the platform early is what separates the sellers doing serious numbers from everyone else.

Platform	Best for	Buyer profile
TikTok Shop	Impulse purchases under $60	Younger, scroll-driven
Whatnot	Collectibles, community auctions	Hobbyists and collectors
YouTube Live	Higher-priced items needing demonstration	Slightly older buyers

Which live selling categories are still wide open?

Four categories are still wide open in live selling: home goods, tools and hardware, pet supplies, and books, all of which map almost perfectly to what QVC’s audience used to buy from cable. This matters because of where most new live sellers go wrong. They watch a Tiffany Ivanovsky or a Brandon Young, see the numbers, and try to do the exact same thing in the exact same category. By the time they show up to sell, the category is full and the algorithm has nothing left to give them. Picking the right category is the difference between an audience that grows and one that gets buried under a thousand other sellers.

The saturated categories are the ones you would guess. Beauty and skincare on TikTok Shop is the worst of them, with health and beauty accounting for roughly 79 percent of all US TikTok Shop sales in 2024 and a sky-high bar for new entrants.

Boutique women’s clothing is right behind it, where the top sellers already have audiences in the hundreds of thousands. Trading cards on Whatnot, jewelry, and pop culture collectibles round out the spaces that are saturated unless you bring something genuinely differentiated.

The four open categories are the ones where live selling barely exists yet. Here is why each one is ripe.

Home goods. The 65-year-old who used to buy kitchen gadgets, bedding, vacuums, and seasonal decor from QVC has nowhere obvious to go. A handful of sellers do it well on TikTok Shop, but demand is far ahead of supply.
Tools and hardware. Men over 40 are one of the largest orphaned audiences in live commerce. A single creator demonstrating power tools, knives, fishing gear, or auto detailing can capture that market with almost no competition.
Pet supplies. Brands like Petlibro built major businesses on smart feeders and fountains, but almost all of it came through Amazon and retail. The live commerce side of pets is still wide open.
Books. BookTok generated 59 million print book sales and over $760 million in US revenue in 2024, almost entirely from creators talking about books. The live selling side has barely been touched.

Here is the simple filter I would use. Look at what your parents or grandparents used to buy from QVC. Anything on that list, whether bedding, kitchen tools, gardening supplies, vacuums, hardware, or craft kits, has a buyer base that is actively orphaned right now. Whoever shows up with consistency and personality on a live platform in those categories is going to own that audience for the next decade.

How do you avoid making QVC’s mistake?

You avoid QVC’s mistake by going where the audience is moving and being willing to leave a platform before it falls apart under you, which is the one thing QVC could not do. QVC had 88 million households and zero customers, which is why they are dying. The successful sellers I know who have built durable businesses over the last decade share one quality. They were never the best at any single platform. Instead they are on all of them. So you have to diversify and recognize when the next platform is coming.

QVC had every possible advantage and could not use it, because the hardest thing in any online business is not finding the right platform. It is being willing to move to the next one before the current one falls apart under you. QVC could not let go of thirty years of what had worked, and that hesitation cost them everything.

Meanwhile the opportunity in live commerce is real, and the playbook already exists because China has been using it for years. The only question is whether you move while the window is still open or wait until it is obvious.

Frequently asked questions

Why did QVC go bankrupt?

QVC filed Chapter 11 in April 2026 with over $6.6 billion in debt after revenue fell from $10.9 billion in 2023 to $8.3 billion in 2025. The deeper cause was the single-channel trap: it reached 88 million households through cable but never built customer relationships it owned, so when cable viewership declined it had no audience to fall back on.

What is the single-channel trap?

It is building your entire business on a distribution channel you do not own or control, like Amazon, Google search, or a single social platform. When the platform bans you, changes policy, or updates its algorithm, you lose access to customers overnight because the relationship lived on the platform, not with you.

How much better does live shopping convert than a normal store?

A traditional Shopify store converts at about 2 to 3 percent, while live shopping converts at over 30 percent. The difference comes from trust built with a community before the sale ever starts, since buyers show up specifically for the seller rather than being interrupted by an ad.

Which live selling platform should I use?

It depends on your product. TikTok Shop is strongest for impulse purchases under $60, Whatnot is built around collectibles and community auctions, and YouTube Live reaches a slightly older buyer for higher-priced items that need demonstration. Matching the category to the platform early is what separates the top sellers.

What product categories are wide open in live commerce?

Home goods, tools and hardware, pet supplies, and books are all underserved. They map closely to what QVC’s older audience used to buy from cable, and that buyer base is now orphaned. A consistent seller with personality in any of these can own the audience with little competition.

How do I protect my business from a platform change?

Build an owned audience in parallel with any third-party platform, through email, SMS, or a private community. The platform is how you find customers, but an owned list is how you keep them. Over 60 percent of my own revenue now comes from owned channels, which is what carried the business through a Google algorithm update that wiped out organic traffic.

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QVC Just Went Bankrupt. Here’s Why That’s Great News for You