March 10, 2010
By the ZippyCart Ecommerce Software Content Team
The performance of Sears traditional brick and mortar stores have not impressed industry analysts, but their ecommerce efforts have been generating buzz and more online products are coming in 2010. Sears already has a very popular mobile enabled site and FREE iPhone app called Sears2Go, where you can easily access anything sold online via their ecommerce site. In addition, you can use the GPS capabilities on certain smart phones to easily navigate to a retail store, if you want to review something in person. One of the other top features of the Sears2Go app is the option to see coupons, sales, and deals from their weekly advertisements. Sears2Go has been running strong, but more initiatives have also contributed to help spike the web traffic Sears has been seeing for their ecommerce store. Internet Retailer even ranked them at third for December 2009 for web traffic, which was well ahead of Target and Wal-Mart.
Sears still has a serious uphill battle going up against Amazon.com and Wal-mart.com for online sales, as both brands have been very aggressive in the space over the last few years. There were 62 Sears store closures in 2009, and more planned in 2010, which means that their ecommerce efforts need to succeed or they may be boxed out of the marketplace. This is why Sears is investing in the ecommerce space, because they feel they can yield the proper returns over time that their investors will want to see. Overall investment is very minimal for the online space, in comparison to brick and mortar retail shops. Therefore Sears still has a shot to make a comeback and impress investors, but they have strong competition that will be hard to beat.
Amy is the co-founder of ZippyCart. She went to school for film in Cleveland, Ohio and ended up working in the field of viral video marketing, which eventually led her to her real profession: SEO. When she's not writing for ZippyCart, she can be found out and about Seattle, WA.
