Sears Canada has activated the latest update to its already content-rich Web site, adding an equivalent French-language page for every one in English and placing it squarely among Canada’s most comprehensive and function-filled retail e-commerce portals.
The entire Sears Canada catalogue inventory has been available for on-line purchase since late 1997, with plenty of cross-selling opportunities provided by separate pages for Sears Travel and Flowers by Sears as well as retail sub-brands like Whole Home Furniture and Home Central.
Other opportunities for collecting customer data are generated by sign-up pages for added-value services like Mature Outlook, Gift Registry, AutoAssist, and the Sears Card and Sears Club credit and loyalty programs.
Despite all that functionality, Sears executives say many customers have been using the site simply as a kind of service extension to the paper catalogue.
‘We do get a lot more orders from people who already have the paper catalogue, use it to decide what items they want to buy, then go to the Web site and fill in the order blank,’ says John Pullam, national manager, electronic commerce, Sears Canada. ‘That was a surprise to us in the beginning. We assumed people would use the 1-800 number, but there seems to be a set of people who, for whatever personal reasons, prefer to do business that way.’
Pullam says revenues from Internet sales are about the same as you’d expect from a smaller Sears store. And that the site’s real value is as a relationship-building tool
‘We see the site as a complement to all of our customer relationship-building efforts. Sure, there may be some people for whom this is the only side of Sears they know, but we see it as a resource, one that people can visit to find out all sorts of things about us.’
Just as with orders placed through the catalogue call centre, on-line orders are downloaded into Sears Canada’s catalogue fulfillment database. Though Pullam says the Web site hasn’t really bloomed as a profiling tool, Sears is looking at ways to use it better as a means of measuring purchase and other kinds of consumer behavior.
As previously reported in Strategy DirectResponse, Sears Canada has made significant capital investments in new database technology, starting with a new mainframe computer in March of 1997. Among other initiatives, the company has been experimenting with catalogues tailored to different customer segments.
