Just a week ago, Google was celebrating its new status at the top of the smart speaker heap when reports revealed that the Google Home had beaten all other competitors when it came to the number of units shipped. But as ever in this fast changing space, the celebration was short-lived. A new report now suggests that the best selling smart speaker in the market remains within the Amazon Echo ecosystem. The less-than-$50 Echo Dot is definitively the most popular smart home speaker around. The report comes from Thinknum, who tracked “sales raking data since 2016 at Best Buy for the category.”
Why Best Buy? As Thinknum points out, it’s the only major electronics store that sells smart speakers from all the major folks — Amazon, Google, and Apple. You can’t entirely trust online data, as the Google Home isn’t even sold on Amazon (and if you search for it, you’ll instead be taken to a page to buy the Echo), and similarly, you can’t buy the Apple HomePod from the Google Store (or vice versa).
And while there are other retailers that carry all three product lines, none sell quite as many as Best Buy does, nor have they been carrying these products for as long as Best Buy has — in fact, Best Buy first started selling smart speakers way back in 2016, before they were truly considered must-haves for all smart homes.
Ever since then, the Echo Dot has been the top seller. In fact, the top three spots in the best seller list all belong to the Echo Dot — most popular is the second-generation device in black, followed by the white version, followed by the original Dot. The Google Home Mini comes in at fourth place, and has a similar price point of around $45.
The Apple HomePod is, by comparison, struggling to keep up. When looking at the top 20 smart speakers, the HomePod ranks 17. This isn’t entirely surprising given that critics have bemoaned the lack of third-party integrations and the smart speaker’s inability to do much more than play songs from Apple Music. Plus, the steep price tag makes it a bit inaccessible to some customers, especially when they have a much cheaper option (like the Echo Dot) to fall back on.
