HERE'S ALL THE REAL NITTY GRITTY!!!
Michael A. George -- President, Chief Executive Officer & Director
Thank you, Courtnee and good morning everyone. The third quarter was challenging with continued sales and OIBDA pressure at QXH and Zulily. However we were pleased to see Cornerstone turned to growth after adjusting for the closure of improvements and a further acceleration of growth at QVC International. And despite the sales pressures we achieved strong growth in free cash flow. As we look ahead we are intensely focused on improving our operating results accelerating synergy capture and better positioning our companies for a changing marketplace while sustaining strong cash flow.
Turning to QXH. Let me start by welcoming Leslie Ferraro to our company. Leslie joined us in September and has jumped right into her new role as President of QXH. Since Q3 marks our third quarter of declining sales of QXH I want to take some time on this call to walk through the categories and the customer segments that are contributing to the decline; summarize what we believe are the major drivers behind these declines; and most importantly share what actions we're taking to improve the trend and return to strong performance.
So I'll start with the category view. Our home business is down $45 million in the quarter versus last year and down $88 million for the year driven largely by 3 pressure points. First at the end of last year we closed HSN's Joy Mangano Ingenious Design subsidiary. While this brand's sales productivity was strong its cost structure was unattractive necessitating the closure. The exit has created short-term sales pressures along with margin challenges as we cleared the inventory. We anniversary the exit at the end of the year.
Second the kitchen electrics business has entered a more challenging product innovation cycle and we're beginning to see this impact our sales especially in Q3.
And third the premium mattress category a significant business for us is undergoing a dramatic shift as consumers migrate to bed in a box options. Our team has done a terrific job jumping on this trend with our successful partnership with Casper the innovation leader in this space along with our proprietary offerings from Northern Nights and our Scott Living products. However this new category comes at a significantly lower price point than traditional premium mattresses which is pressuring overall sales.
Our fashion businesses of apparel accessories and footwear are down $17 million in the quarter and $32 million for the year. This is a significant change in trend as these businesses had been strong drivers of growth over the last several years. These categories are down substantially across the industry and while we're gaining market share we have not been able to sustain growth.
Our beauty business is up $9 million for the quarter and down $4 million for the year. Similar to fashion this year's performance is a significant change in trend as beauty had been a strong contributor to growth for many years. And it reflects a substantial slowing of the prestige beauty market as you've heard from other beauty retailers and manufacturers. We were encouraged to get back to growth in Q3 in the face of these category headwinds.
Our consumer electronics business is flat for the quarter and up $18 million for the year.
It's a modest factor in the worsening trend in Q3 and reflects challenges we're experiencing in securing compelling offers at attractive margins in some of our biggest brands and items especially for our off-air assortments.
And finally our jewelry business is down $20 million for the quarter and $60 million for the year as we continue to reduce jewelry airtime in favor of more productive categories. Since jewelry has been declining for multiple years it is not contributing to the worsening sales trend this year.
Now turning to the customer view. The overall sales decline is reflected in a modest pullback across the customer base but we're encouraged that we don't see significant pressure in any one customer segment. Fundamentally our customers are still with us and we just need to do a better job every day giving her a reason to buy. In particular for existing customers who represent about 87% of our sales in the trailing 12 months count declined 3% in the quarter and 1% in the last 12 months while the average spend per customer was largely stable. Importantly the declining count has not translated into any meaningful change in retention rates which we measure on a rolling 12-month basis.
Rather it indicates that some of our more infrequent customers pulled back from making a purchase in the quarter. For our new customers who represent about 7% of sales in the last 12 months we were encouraged to see continued growth in count up 1% in the quarter and a strong 5% over the last 12 months. Q3 marks our ninth consecutive quarter of positive or flat new customer growth at QVC and the second consecutive quarter of growth at HSN. While most new customers come to us organically our added investments in performance marketing are helping now bringing in 30% of new customers.
Finally for reactivated customers who represent about 6% of sales in the last 12 months. Count was down mid-single digits for the quarter and the 12-month period reflected in part the challenges in our apparel and kitchen electrics businesses which outperformed with reactivants as well as the overall softness in on-air sales.
So after giving you this category and customer view let's step back to talk about root causes. In our business it's never just 1 or 2 things that drive big changes in trend up or down but rather a confluence of factors. And these factors we believe can be summarized into 3 broad buckets. First we're facing a choppy retail environment.
As I mentioned many of our largest and most strategic categories are under significant pressure. According to market research firm NPD in the U.S. women's apparel accessories and footwear sales are all in negative growth territory industrywide for the third quarter and year-to-date through September and prestige beauty and kitchen appliance sales have slowed dramatically from the prior year. Second we continue to experience execution pressures associated with the acquisition of HSN. The reorganization of our buying teams has created short-term distractions although we believe we're getting to the other side of this.
Our fulfillment network optimization is still in early stages and when completed will provide significant benefits to the customer and the P&L but it is both costly in the short term and creating more service disruptions to customers than we anticipated. And our efforts to stabilize and restructure the HSN business have involved taking a number of difficult and costly steps such as the exiting of Ingenious Designs' business. Despite these short-term pressures we remain fully confident in the acquisition rationale and the power of this combined platform to drive substantial value for customers and shareholders and we are thrilled to have the HSN team in our family. And third we're operating in a changing industry context facing the headwinds of declining linear TV viewership and growing brand proliferation more volatile product life cycles and intense price competition. These headwinds are not new but they add to the other pressures we're seeing.
Offsetting these headwinds are a few powerful tailwinds as well including the rapid growth of digital media and the increasing value of retail platforms that can help brands tell their stories directly to consumers in a compelling authentic immersive and video-rich way. Looking more deeply at TV viewership. We are encouraged that our total minutes viewed continues to grow despite declines in overall reach driven by cord-cutting reflecting continued strength among our more engaged viewers. However the decline in linear viewing does place additional pressure on our ability to reach new and occasional viewers. We're driving a number of initiatives to offset the linear TV erosion with higher viewership across our digital and OTT platforms.
The trend toward shorter and more volatile product life cycles is translating into heightened pressure in some of our larger brands. While we do not have high sales concentration in any one brand 10 of our larger brands representing just 9% of sales accounted for nearly 90% of the year-to-date sales declines. We actually see this as an encouraging sign and a reminder that the difference between growth and decline is concentrated in a small number of brands.
So now that I've shared what's happening and why let me get to what matters: The actions we're taking. While we can't control some of the macro pressures like the challenging fashion cycle or product and price volatility we can respond more effectively to get to better outcomes. So first we're intently focused on disciplined day-to-day execution.
We're controlling our inventories driving improved product margins reducing fixed costs stabilizing the organization and working to deliver more consistent service levels to our customers.
Most importantly we're working hard to delight our customers every day by increasing product differentiation expanding variety and getting new ideas to market faster.
For example in Q3 in fashion we're driving growth in the active and athleisure segment with the launch of Zuda on QVC that's our new proprietary athleisure lifestyle brand; as well as a new exclusive collaboration we launched New Balance x Isaac Mizrahi which brings performance footwear together with unique fashion. In beauty we launched Carmindy Beauty an exclusive beauty brand. She has a significant social following and we supported the launch with extensive programming across our social platforms including Facebook Live and Instagram TV. And we're reinvigorating some downtrending beauty brands with stronger offers to our customers such as vendor-supported free shipping and handling. Second we remain committed to achieving and most likely exceeding our synergy targets.
Third we're tightly managing every element of our cash flow with a commitment to maintaining the high levels of cash flow conversion we've delivered over time even while making important investments in areas like our fulfillment networks and replatforming our website. We have a number of ways we can improve cash conversion even if our adjusted OIBDA results are pressured as we did this quarter.
Finally we're working aggressively to better position our companies for a changing marketplace minimizing the impact of the industry headwinds I mentioned while taking full advantage of the tailwinds. We remain confident in our long-term direction but we need to sharpen our focus and intensify our execution of 5 key strategic initiatives to reestablish growth: To be the industry leader in curating special products at compelling values; to extend our video reach and relevance over all the digital platforms our customers engage with; to reimagine daily digital discovery making our digital experiences as engaging and sticky as our TV experiences; to expand and deepen the engagement of our passionate community of customers; and finally to deliver joyful customer service.
Finally I'll wrap up my comments on QxH with a word about the holiday season. With Thanksgiving falling later than previous years we'll have a shorter window to engage customers for the Christmas shopping period. All retailers face this pressure but with the December 21 being our last ship date without the customer paying for expedited shipping it's more difficult for us to capture last-minute sales.
We've launched a thoughtful merchandising programming and event strategy to pull demand forward as much as possible. To complement this strategy we're integrating new shows like Sean Saves Christmas Down Home with David Very Merry Deals and Get Gifty as well as digital platforms such as Holiday HQ to inspire early gift-giving ideas.
Turning ,now to QVC International. Growth accelerated in the quarter led by strong gains in Japan. We continue to pursue a series of strategic initiatives across international that are largely in line with our efforts at QXH. Notably we're in the early stages of building our European capabilities in performance marketing advanced analytics digital discovery and strategic merchandising. We're also continuing our product margin improvement initiatives including disciplined promotional and inventory management optimizing product mix in airtime and implementing selective price increases which yielded positive results in Q3. I
n Japan we actively prepared for the consumption tax increase from 8% to 10% that went into effect on October 1 applying learning from the last increase in 2014. As a result Q3 benefited by pulling forward demand in advance of the tax increase especially in higher-priced products and categories such as jewelry.
However we do expect the consumption tax increase to have an adverse impact on our Q4 sales. In October as we expected our sales in Japan declined. Turning now to Zulily. Our Q3 performance was highly challenged.
We continue to see significant headwinds in marketing spend efficiency as the cost to acquire new customers continues to rise. We remain disciplined on our marketing return requirements and reduced our overall marketing spend by 14% in the quarter. As a result of lower and less effective marketing spend we saw further erosion in the activation of new and reactivated customers as well as lower purchase frequency among existing customers.
Overall product freshness also continues to be a headwind and we have not made sufficient progress in improvements to our overall customer experience. As we aggressively focus on stabilizing the business we are working to diversify to more efficient marketing channels reinvest in the customer experience and increase our product freshness.
On product we're working aggressively at premier national brands and we've seen some early success partnering with well-known brands Tommy Hilfiger Calvin Klein Ashley Furniture and a pilot with Nike. And we'll do this while maintaining growth and commitment to our unique and boutique brands as well. These actions are combined with a concerted effort to reinvest in the customer experience. We're leaning into our differentiated fun and addictive mobile store with an increased focus on initiatives to earn her trust through operational excellence and exceptional customer programs anchored by price transparency.
In October we launched Best Price Promise which was the first initiative demonstrating our commitment to increase transparency for our customers owning our position as the lowest price leader.
While the vast majority of our merchandise is unique and boutique we have thousands of items that launch daily where we can directly compare our pricing to Amazon and Walmart. Since the launch of our Best Price Promise where a Zulily item is identical to an item sold by Amazon or Walmart as often as 97% of the time Zulily offered the lower price.
With our Best Price Promise we're now featuring Amazon and Walmart's prices on identical items on our product detail pages to highlight our significant price advantage and build customer trust. In addition to our efforts on product and price.
We're investing in improving shipping times and piloting options to lower shipping and returns cost. As we see headwinds in marketing spend efficiency we'll plan to reallocate some of our marketing spend to these efforts and deepen our investment in our customer experience. At Cornerstone excluding improvements we had a strong quarter delivering both top line and OIBDA growth driven by continued strength at Ballard Designs including a strong performance at our retail stores a positive turnaround at Grandin Road and improved trends at Frontgate.
As we move forward we'll be focused on sustaining the momentum in our home segment as well as continuing the progress we're making with our gross margin initiatives and our discipline around operating expenses.
Finally we plan to build upon the Q3 launch of Ryllace our premium plus-sized proprietary fashion brand that fills a real marketplace need. We were pleased with the reaction at its launch event and our teams are now beginning to promote the brand more broadly. Before I turn the call over to Jeff I want to thank our 27000 team members who show up every day striving to make a difference for our customers and our business.
We recently celebrated the launch of a year-long effort involving several hundred team members to shape our Qurate purpose and define the principles for how we'll work together to serve our customers. I am especially grateful in times like these for our team's dedication and passion.
And on this Veterans Day we extend our special appreciation and thanks to all of our QRG team members who have served in the armed forces or whose families have served. A reminder of the upcoming Liberty Investor Day I look forward at having the opportunity to speak with you in greater detail about the strategic initiatives and our areas of focus.
And with that I will turn the call over to Jeff.
Jeffrey A. Davis -- Chief Financial Officer
Thank you Mike and good morning everyone. Beginning with QXH net revenue declined 4% on 4% reduction in unit volume slightly offset by a 1% increase in ASP due primarily to mix shift within home innovations and the home category. Adjusted OIBDA declined 7% and margin rate declined 50 basis points primarily due to sales deleverage and headwinds from network fulfillment upgrades general freight rate increases inventory management and continued marketing investments.
These factors are partially offset by reduced TV commissions synergies and product mix impact. Our network optimization plan will reduce our U.S. fulfillment center footprint to 7 facilities by the end of 2020 down from 9. We had a soft opening of our new Northeast fulfillment center in Q3 handling a modest amount of large-sized non-conveyable products.
We're also continuing to stabilize our Lancaster facility to support apparel fulfillment. We anticipate additional expense headwinds in Q4 primarily from new Northeast site lease and project implementation costs. However we anticipate improved productivity and reduced transportation and fixed costs to start to have a favorable impact on adjusted OIBDA in 2020 along with capital avoidance on facilities we are closing. We will provide an update on our U.S. fulfillment center optimization and current year impact at Investor Day. Finally on QXH we realized cumulative cost synergies of $110 million through September 30. We anticipate total 2019 synergies net of onetime costs to be consistent with our prior indications and we'll provide more detail at Liberty's Investor Day.
Moving to our international business.
In constant currency international delivered a strong quarter with revenue up 3% on an 8% ASP increase which was partially counterbalanced by a 3% decline in unit volume and lower shipping and handling revenue. Japan had the best performance across the markets with strong revenue growth. This performance was driven by better product flow and category level initiatives. Strong demand from its TSV replay and expansion of programming and carriage as well as initiatives to proactively pull forward demand in advance of the Japan consumption tax increase. Adjusted OIBDA grew 15% and margin expanded 180 basis points from gross margin improvement and the closure of our former France operations in March of this year.
At Zulily revenue declined 17% due to the factors that Mike mentioned. Zulily also recognized a $1 billion noncash impairment charge which is not included in adjusted OIBDA and is the primary driver of its operating loss. Approximately 60% of the charge was related to its trade name with the remainder attributed to goodwill. Adjusted OIBDA declined 56% and OIBDA margin declined 200 basis points primarily due to sales deleverage of supply chain and fixed costs partially offset by reduced marketing spend. Our initiatives and actions to diversify and test new marketing channels and strategically reinvest and enhance the customer experience will take time to yield meaningful results.
We anticipate the current rate of sales erosion to accelerate in the near term given the reduced number of new and reactivated customers compared with prior periods. Our Cornerstone business returned to growth with revenue up 5% and adjusted OIBDA increasing $3 million excluding the improvements business that was closed in Q4 of last year. The business gained traction with product margin initiatives and remain disciplined with operating costs shifting marketing spend from catalog to digital. Looking at the business broadly we had not seen a material impact from tariffs levied to date. As a reminder the next tranche will not go into effect until mid-December. In total the announced tariffs cover approximately 35% to 40% of total Qurate Retail cost of retail sales.
Approximately 80% of the tariff imposed cost of sales is from vendor-sourced products meaning we have -- we are better-abled to mitigate the tariff impact with our vendor partners with the remainder of the product is direct imports. Of our overall exposure approximately 1/3 are in electronics with the rest spread evenly across apparel accessories and the remainder of our home categories.
Our teams continue to work closely with vendors to share the cost burden across the supply chain and increase prices where necessary as well as look to shift product sourcing from China to mitigate any impacts to our results. While it's too early to predict the impact on future sales demand we will continue to monitor the situation and hope for a swift resolution to the trade dispute.
Let me wrap up my comments with a discussion on capital expenditures and cash flow. Capital expenditures were approximately $83 million in the quarter and $249 million year-to-date on a cash basis. For the full year we now anticipate cash capex to be approximately $370 million to $390 million on a cash basis which is in line with our prior estimate but higher than prior years. The increase is attributable to our U.S. fulfillment network optimization initiative and continued information technology and commerce platform investments.
Shifting to the balance sheet and cash flow. We improved free cash flow in Q3 primarily due to the timing of the renewal of TV distribution rights and the absence of transaction-related costs incurred in the prior year and disciplined working capital management. Finally QVC's consolidated leverage ratio as defined in our credit agreement was 2.3x at September 30 as compared to a maximum ratio of 3.5x.
With that I'll now turn it over to Greg.
Gregory B. Maffei -- Chairman
Thank you Jeff. Let me comment a little bit on our capital allocation philosophy at Qurate. We look at the following buckets which are not necessarily mutually exclusive. First investment in the business for the future. capex as you heard from Jeff is elevated in 2019 as we invest in IT and other fulfillment initiatives but we expect this to revert to more normal levels in 2020 in part as we complete the integration of HSN. Secondly managing our tax exposure. While the tax liability from our exchangeable bonds was reduced substantially due to tax reform we've decided to be proactive in some of the elements including attacking the MSI bonds. And toward that end we repurchased $88 million of bonds in October and hedged a portion of our uncovered MSI exposure.
We also continue to deploy capital into what we believe are very attractive tax-advantaged investments and you've heard about some of those in the past. Third return of capital to shareholders. This year through 10/31 we bought $392 million of stock. We will continue to be opportunistic going forward but are aware that the stock has experienced much more volatility this year. Qurate continues to generate very strong free cash flow and we will prudently invest that across all of the buckets I mentioned above. As Mike and Jeff mentioned we look forward to seeing many of you next week at our Annual Investor Meeting on Thursday November 21 in New York. The link to register is on the homepage of our website. We appreciate your continued interest in Qurate Retail.
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