- QVC may have to change suppliers and prices to adapt to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, but those changes will not fundamentally change its business, according to CEO David Rawlinson II. The boss told The New York Times one silver lining of navigating tariffs is that all retailers have to confront them.
If there’s any consolation to President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs that have rocked the markets and spurred recession fears, QVC CEO David Rawlinson II suggested he may have found it.
As the shopping network prepares to weather Trump’s—including a 145% tax on most imports from China—Rawlinson said QVC is prepared to adapt and at the very least, retailers are all in the same boat of dealing with the levies.
“We’ll navigate the environment as it changes,” Rawlinson told The New York Times in an interview published Friday. “One of the good things is all retailers are experiencing this together. So it shouldn’t preference one retailer over another by too much.”
QVC—which stands for Quality, Value, and Convenience—has already considered what tariffs would mean for television and online marketplace business. Supply from China is “significant on the business,” Gregory Maffei, executive chairman of QVC-parent Qurate Retail, said in a February call with investors, adding the company would consider whether increased costs needed to be passed down to consumers.
While QVC thrived during the pandemic lockdown when more prospective shoppers spent time at home watching television, the company couldn’t keep the momentum. Consumers turned away from cable bundles in favor of streaming, and QVC saw steep competition from platforms like Temu and Shein. QVC announced earlier this month plans to revive sales by partnering with TikTok to launch five non-stop shopping streams on the app.
Rawlinson said when it comes to tariffs, QVC will need to assess changes to manufacturers, importers, or customer prices, but that the changes won’t rock the core of the company.
“We may have to buy differently. We may have to source differently. We may have to price differently,” Rawlinson told the NYT. “We may compete differently, but the fundamentals of what we do are not going to change.”
He added: “What becomes really important is to help people see a path through to the other end.”
Despite countless retail executives addressing investors’ tariff concerns since Trump’s return to the White House, many CEOs have kept a level head about the impact of the levies, having diversified supply chains or moved production out of China in response to Trump’s first round of tariffs during his first administration. QVC was no exception, having taken a “considerable amount” of their source supply from China since 2018, according to Maffei.
QVC did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Do tariffs impact all retailers equally?
Though the tariff environment is so volatile and unpredictable, every retailer will have to contend with similar supply chain questions because of the near-universal reliance on goods from China, according to Moira Weigel, a Harvard University professor of comparative literature who researches social media and marketplace platforms.
But not every retailer will experience the levies in the same way, she said, and the ramifications may vary based on the size and type of business platform.
“It's not unreasonable to believe that maybe the tariffs affect e-commerce and affect a marketplace like Amazon a little differently than they affect Walmart or a big brick-and-mortar retailer,” Weigel told Fortune.
On Amazon, for example, pricing competition is intense and transparent, Weigel said. Because many shoppers are looking for a product rather than a brand, they will more likely buy the more affordable product, incentivizing suppliers to keep costs low. Amazon has good reason to keep costs low, in part to not draw criticism from consumers over rocketing prices. The company is also penalizing some sellers for raising prices as a result of tariffs, which have led to plummeting sales, Fortune’s Jason Del Ray reported Friday, citing about a dozen sellers.
A retailer’s relationship with tariffs may be further complicated by its size and supply chains, Weigel said. Some platforms may rely more heavily on Chinese suppliers; smaller marketplaces may not have the same resources as a giant like Walmart to eat the costs of the tariffs as opposed to passing them down to consumers.
QVC, which curates its inventory and spends many resources on the storytelling component of its business, will face distinctive challenges, Dani Nadel, president and chief operating officer at e-commerce advisory Feedvisor, told Fortune in an email. Because of the entertainment component of the business, QVC is more heavily involved in the marketing and price-setting components of its platform, Nadel suggested, making navigating tariffs more disruptive to the rhythm of its operations.
“When tariffs drive up costs, delay shipments, or force last-minute changes to bundles, that entire rhythm can be thrown off, requiring QVC to pivot quickly, repackage value with vendors, and recalibrate its on-air strategy to maintain the customer experience,” she said.
