As Best Buy Co looks to cut its costs and shift its business to capitalize on increasing online sales, the retailer is cutting jobs across the country.

According to people familiar with the situation, this week the company began informing its “consultants,” people who specialize in selling more complex electronics like smartphones and computers, that their jobs are being eliminated.

Across the company’s more than 900 stores, the move will eliminate hundreds of jobs. The workload of the consultants will be transferred to a smaller number of similar roles, and the affected employees will be allowed to reapply to the company for open positions, or they can receive severance.

A spokesperson for the company said, “We’re evolving our stores and the experiences we offer to better reflect the changes in customer shopping behavior, as well as how we organize our teams to ensure we continue to provide our expertise, products and services in the best way possible.”

Over the past two years, as buying habits shifted and the demand for electronics and appliances fell following its peak earlier in the pandemic, the company has been making a series of store-level job cuts. Over that period it has eliminated the positions of workers who helped people plan home entertainment layouts and make their purchases, stock shelves, or man the sales floor. Earlier this year, the company had launched a wave of layoffs in its Canadian stores.

On an earnings call last month, Best Buy Chief Executive Corie Barry said, “Over the past three years we have been optimizing our store staffing model to reflect the changes in customer shopping behavior and to fuel investments in higher wages.”

In early 2020, Best Buy had almost 125,000 workers in the US and Canada, according to finance filings. However that number, as of January, had dropped to a little more than 90,000 workers. Some of the job losses are due to the closure of about 70 large-format stores which occurred over the last three years.

The reorganization has become more important as the company has sought to adapt to the increase on online sales. In 2020, sales through digital channels amounted to about 19% of revenue. However in the year ended in January, sales through digital channels amounted to 33% of revenue.

The company has been feeling increasing pressure in recent quarters as well, as sales have fallen off in the wake of the rush to buy electronics during the early pandemic rush, and inflation has sapped consumers pocketbooks, forcing them to focus more on essentials, such as food and fuel.

On the earnings call, Ms. Barry said that for the coming year, “macroeconomic headwinds will likely result in continued volatility and we are preparing for another down year for the [consumer-electronics] industry.”