After shutting down operations in January, CircuitCity.com is back after Systemax purchased the brand and domain at bankruptcy auction for $14 million. Systemax also owns TigerDirect.com and acquired CompUSA last year. CircuitCity.com was quickly relaunched last week to capitalize on the remaining brand strength and traffic to the website. The relaunch caused an immediate spike in traffic and the weekly market share of visits to CircuitCity.com increased 230% last week as compared to the previous week. Among the retailers in the Appliances and Electronics category, CircuitCity.com jumped from being ranked at #26 for the week ending May 23, 2009 to #10 last week.

Last week, 84% of the visitors to CircuitCity.com were new, or had not visited in the past 30 days. Much of the surge in traffic can be attributed to an email campaign to reach out to potential CircuitCity.com customers since nearly 33% of the upstream traffic was referred by web-based email services. The campaign was successful in driving visitors to the website that hopefully were previous customers that wish to re-engage with the brand.

Even when the website was not operational, there were still visits and searches on the brand taking place, which displays ongoing interest in CircuitCity.com despite a tough environment for capturing consumer spending.