Sears.com Moves Forward With Fashion
To date, Sears, Roebuck and Co. has used its Web site, www.sears.com, primarily to promote the mixed model of buying items online and picking them up at a bricks-and-mortar store. More than almost any other retailer, it now counts about 40 percent of its online customers in this category, and the number is likely to rise during the holiday season as lastminute shoppers look to bypass the crowds.
The giant retailer’s traffic increased 13 percent from January to August, significantly beating the overall 2 percent growth of the entire retail sector, according to ComScore Networks Inc. (www.comscore.com), a Reston, Va.–based consumer marketing consultancy. ComScore ranks the Sears site—which had 6.8 million visitors last August—22nd among U.S. online retailers. But Sears wants more.
To this end, Sears is gearing up to sell much more clothing from its Web site by the end of next year, Chief Executive Officer Alan Lacy told an online retail conference last month. The site currently announces the launch will take place next summer. Whatever the exact date, the site will offer a far greater selection of apparel in all categories than is available in any of Sears’ bricks-and-mortar stores, said company spokesman Bill Masterson.
The apparel section of the site currently offers very limited selections in five categories while informing users that “at this time, most Sears clothing is available only in our retail stores.” New enhancements to the site—just added in time for the holidays— feature an array of snappy weekly specials on the home page and vastly improved “smart” search functions.
Part of this effort is undoubtedly due to Sears’ $1.9 billion acquisition in 2002 of the well-established online innovator and cataloger Lands’ End Inc. But Sears is not just absorbing and replicating what has worked so successfully on the Lands’ End site.
Last summer, Sears began testing a real-time online chat system that enables customers to “talk” with a knowledgeable salesperson while browsing the site. Retail experts concur that such a level of personal attention is critical to converting savvy, demanding apparel shoppers into happy apparel customers.
The further-enhanced site will fine-tune the user-interface design and functions. It will feature automatic product comparisons that will dynamically present the shopper who has made a tentative selection with a side-by-side comparison of similar items. This feature will be augmented with multiple product views and detailed displays.
All of this is risky business considering the costs of implementing the Web-based software and dealing with the database management issues that Sears will have to face to deliver what it describes. It is also risky because many still believe that apparel has difficulty making inroads online, given customers’ propensity to want to touch and try on goods before making a purchase.
However, the fact that gaining a bigger slice of the retail pie—through apparel sales—is a key part of Sears’ strategy is encouraging news, indeed.
Site Review: Mlle. Pearl
Jennifer Nicholson named her Santa Monica, Calif., boutique, Mlle. Pearl, in loving memory of her first French bulldog (she has four of them now). The store is sassy, hip and sometimes irreverent. Correspondingly, her retail Web site, www.mllepearl.com, represents the cutting-edge retro vibe that the former “surfer chick” brings to her work. The site is full of fun, with documentation of the native California designer’s fashion escapades in a section called “Red Carpet.”
Not everyone can get to Santa Monica, so this site is a perfect alternative with its state-of-the-art, simple-to-use shopping cart.
“My philosophy for both my own design line and all of the items I buy for Pearl is fairly simple— true style is ignoring ’fashion’ and having your own style,” said Nicholson. That translates well online, too.
