Online home appliance shopping has become increasingly convenient in recent years, allowing consumers to browse styles, compare prices and place orders right from their mobile phones at home. This trend is also reflected in the 2025 home appliance industry monitoring data released by Ovum—the online retail sales of home appliances surged 14% year-on-year in the first half of the year alone.
Does the booming online consumption signal that physical stores should scale back their operations? The answer is a resounding no. In 2025, Haier’s home appliance retail network launched an intensive wave of digital transformation. Following the successive openings of stores in Hangzhou, Beijing, Tianjin, Taiyuan and other cities, the inauguration of the Shanghai Experience Center on December 12 marked that this digitalization-driven store upgrading initiative has covered nearly 1,000 brand stores.
What about the performance of these digital stores? To be specific, the 9 Haier City Experience Centers (with an area of over 500 square meters) that opened during the National Day holiday have already achieved retail sales exceeding RMB 40 million. Among them, the Shenyang City Experience Center has registered cumulative sales of over RMB 6 million since its opening, with a projected annual sales increase of RMB 10 million per store. In addition, the 407 upgraded Haier City Flagship Stores (with an area of over 200 square meters) in the second half of the year have generated RMB 1.467 billion in sales. The company also plans to upgrade another 600 similar stores in 2026, which is expected to drive an additional sales growth of RMB 3 billion.
Why can digital stores withstand the impact of online retail? Simply put, they have effectively addressed two major pain points of traditional home appliance stores.
First, in terms of customer acquisition, digitalization has broken the constraints of time and space, expanding customer acquisition channels. The stores have established in-depth cooperation with platforms such as Amap and Douyin Local Services—customers can quickly locate physical stores via Amap and claim live-streaming coupons on Douyin for in-store redemption. Statistics from January to June show that through digital operations, the stores have generated 526,400 business leads, converting into RMB 1.49 billion in retail sales. Notably, the number of A3 high-intent users on Douyin surged 52% year-on-year, while the volume of active searches by users on Xiaohongshu rose 26% year-on-year.
Second, the digitalization of transaction and inventory management has improved operational efficiency. The digital transaction system simplifies the return and exchange process, accelerating product turnover and enhancing capital liquidity. Digital inventory management enables precise connection with logistics nodes and rational warehouse planning, boosting goods turnover efficiency. Currently, by deepening the digital inventory reform, Haier Smart Home has realized centralized warehousing for direct-to-consumer (ToC) delivery. In the first three quarters, 74% of products sold at county-level exclusive stores were delivered directly to end-users.
Beyond more efficient operations, superior product and service experience is the key to retaining customers. To this end, Haier’s digital stores not only offer premium products such as the Wheat Wave Refrigerator equipped with AI freshness preservation technology that integrates with health scenarios, but also provide full-process services including device control, smart scenario customization, logistics and after-sales support through the Haier Smart Home APP.
The deployment of nearly 1,000 Haier digital stores is not only an upgrade of the retail network, but also a practical implementation of the company’s full-process ToC transformation philosophy. At this critical stage of industry restructuring, the value unleashed by digital stores will provide replicable practical experience for the home appliance retail sector.
(Reprinted from https://news.eccn.com/）