Last week Sears announced the launch of their own marketplace, touting that they would offer consumers “more than 10 million products from more than 1,500 sellers across 400 categories.” Sounds like a great idea. Except for a few things. Here are my thoughts mapped back to the framework I presented last week.
REACH: How will Sears ever build the traffic necessary to support a marketplace that offers over 10 million products? With a quick reach comparison between Sears and Amazon, Walmart, and eBay, it seems that Sears has a long, challenging battle ahead of them to capture the eyeballs necessary for success. It’s not impossible, I’m just not sure they will be able to compete.
RELEVANCY: Will Sears be able to expand their brand in consumers’ minds as a “one stop shop” for a large variety of goods? Amazon proved in 2009 they were so much more than a marketplace for books, dvds, and video games. But I’m skeptical that the mass-merchants trying to do the same will see the same success. Walmart is trying, but has a long way to go. And Sears, I’m afraid has an ever longer haul ahead of them.
TRUSTWORTHY CONNECTIONS: If Sears can increase reach and prove to be relevant to their target consumer segments, then they face the trust challenge. Sears has product reviews (one of the top features for building trust and driving conversion), but will they offer this functionality to the sellers? Probably so. And I’m sure Sears is offering sellers a mechanism for receiving ratings and testimonials. But both of these features – product reviews and seller ratings tools – take time to accumulate and add value. The longer it takes for consumers to feel comfortable buying from sellers outside the Sears network, the larger the gap grows between Sears and the competitors.
USER-CENTRICITY: At first glance, I think the Sears user experience lacks focus and isn’t centered around the customer – whether that be a buyer or seller. It honestly seems like they tried to offer every tool, feature, and piece of content under the sun without giving real thought to how consumers use them. I was overwhelmed at every stage of the browsing process. Every page on this site is extremely busy. My brain couldn’t calm down enough to focus on where to go next. Here are two examples of poor site experience.
The filtering at the category level needs significant improvement. I’m not certain sellers should be the first filter consumers would use in the very long list of options. And sometimes too many options are worse than not enough. And as I clicked through the various filters, the results weren’t properly mapped to my selections. This is a common problem when companies map products back to industry categories or based on how they classify them within their own departments. Poor classification takes all of the value out of filtering tools.
User testing and site analytics will tell the full story over time, but I know I had a hard time narrowing down my selections when searching for exercise DVDs. In fact, I ended up getting a result for a video titled “Sex Madness” in the Fitness category.
In my opinion, the biggest missed opportunity comes with the Ideas and Inspiration features and content. While the site offers great tools for moving consumers through the shopping funnel, the organization of this content needs to be reworked.
It would be great if users could click on the Ideas and Inspiration tab and enter a portal that serves as a hub for these resources. The content and labels’ naming conventions could be more relevant and better organized. And it would also be nice to see snippets from each piece of content/functionality as a preview before leaving the portal page.
After some basic reorganizing of content, it would be very helpful if users could see what resources other consumers found most helpful along their journey, tag these resources, and share them with their friends. One more suggestion – how about letting your sellers provide some of this content? What a great way to a) offset some of the content creation responsibilities and b) foster trust between buyers and sellers!
To test out the experience, I clicked on “Jewelry” under the Buying Guides header I was taken to this page to the left. I don’t even know what to do here. And had I not scrolled down, I would’ve missed the content specific to jewelry.
In addition to the Ideas and Inspiration area, Sears should be surfacing these content nuggets and features contextually throughout the shopping experience. When I checked out the jewelry category page, there were no call-outs pointing to this content.
Those are just a few examples of how I think Sears is lacking in terms of offering a solid customer experience. What I find most unfortunate is that these features and content, with a more user-centric execution, could differentiate Sears from its competitors.
To be fair Sears only official opened up the marketplace to outside sellers this week. I’m interested to see how the next few months unfold. I think they have a long road ahead of them, but only time will tell if they will be able to differentiate themselves from the existing marketplaces and gain some of their competitors’ share of wallet.
