Company Report: ShopNBC
ShopNBC Behind the scenes of ShopNBC's 24-hour home shopping broadcast is a highly orchestrated team that brings the best quality products right to your living room

Americans like to shop, and they certainly love a great value.

In fact, there are probably few things that Americans love better. Unless, perhaps, it is the ability to shop for a great deal without even having to leave home. After all, Americans also crave convenience.

Combine retail shopping, attractive prices, and home convenience, and you should have a guaranteed recipe for success. And, indeed, those three ingredients have led to much success for so-called home shopping networks, including ShopNBC.

Headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minn., ShopNBC operates a popular 24-hour live television sales network. The company specializes in fine jewelry and watches (which were its original product lines), but has expanded its offerings in recent years to include a variety of other lines, such as apparel, fashion accessories, computers, electronics, and home and outdoor furnishings.

ShopNBC saw its beginnings as ValueVision International in 1990. And in 2001, this network rebranded its television and Internet business as ShopNBC as part of its partnership with NBC.

The primary competitors of ShopNBC are the QVC Network, and the Home Shopping Network (HSN).

Standing out

ShopNBC has a simple and straight-forward formula: airing a variety of high quality merchandise, sorted concepts and categories, for limited time periods, at great values, for television audiences to see first hand, and make a purchase.

In the home shopping space, the format for airing sale items is very similar from one network to another. That puts the pressure on each network to differentiate itself in the areas of quality and price, or in certain core product areas.

For that reason, as much as it has expanded into other areas, ShopNBC has remained faithful to its jewelry and watch customers, and those items are still a large percentage of available offerings, according to Holly Shaskey-Platek, vice president of planning, programming and promotions at ShopNBC.

And if you're in the market for some really fine jewelry, Shaskey-Platek says ShopNBC has lots of items to show you

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