With an estimated 40% of the home appliance market in the offline world, one of Sears’ most visibly successful efforts on the web has been using the Internet’s research and comparison capacities to drive shoppers into its stores to close the sale of washers and dryers. But Sears is selling plenty of other goods on the web, and many of those sales are being delivered to Sears’ door by paid search under its agreement with pay-for-placement search engine Overture – even for some of Sears’ more esoteric products.
At this week’s Retail Advertising and Marketing Council conference in Chicago, Sears search engine manager Scott Kluth told the story of a Sears merchant manager with a supplier or warehouse problem – or so she thought – involving quesadilla makers that Sears sold. During the holiday season, the manager was unable to find stock of the item anywhere in inventory. After looking for possible problems in warehouse or with supplier delivery, investigation revealed that the items couldn’t be found in stock because the they were selling on Sears.com every day. Locking up the appropriate keywords on quesadilla makers with Overture – and Overture’s distribution of search results to major engines such as AOL, MSN and Yahoo – was delivering enough shoppers that Sears was selling 400 or more units online every day during the season. As current inventory levels were uploaded into the system every night after the day’s sales were posted, the manager would arrive every morning to find the item out of stock.
“It was the same with diaper genies,” said Kluth. “Now it’s videos. Too bad it’s not $1,000 refrigerators.” Kluth noted that Sears now has 15,000 products online, representing 85 product categories from nearly 500 manufacturers. Paid search has become an integral part of Sears’ online marketing strategy, on which the company is spending at a level “comparable to e-mail marketing,” he said.
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