Sears, one of the largest e-tailers in the US, has just relaunched the websites for two of its online brands, Kmart.com and Sears.com, and has introduced an interesting new multi-search feature.
This means that shoppers at either of the relaunched websites can search on one site and receive product results across both of them. Sears has also added tabs at the top of each page that allow users to quickly access any of the company's six e-commerce sites.
So, if I search for an iPod on Sears, I get results from Kmart as well:
For some items, searching across two sites will produce large numbers of matching products, but the websites have some good filtered navigation options to deal with this problem.
Users can choose to limit their search to just one of the sites, or filter by colour, price, memory size, or user rating; all good options which should make product searches more manageable:
So far, so good, but there are some aspects which may irritate customers, such as the fact that selecting to buy an item from Kmart when on the Sears site opens a new window, rather than just taking you straight to the site.
Also, all of the sites aren't integrated, so while you can move from Sears or Kmart to another site without losing the contents of your cart, switching from the other four sites will mean that the items you have already added to your basket will be lost.
Gap tried a similar idea with its relaunched site last year, integrating all of its brands into a single checkout function, though searches are restricted to the one site. According to one survey, despite the benefits in terms of reduced delivery costs, this had the effect of undermining brand perception, something that, if true, Sears is risking here.
I'm not convinced by that argument, though, and the benefits of providing customers with a greater range of products to search through may well outweigh such concerns.
Graham Charlton is Editor at Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin or Google+.
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CEO at Econsultancy
11:19AM on 30th March 2009
There seems to be a broader trend at work which is rather than let yourself get aggregated, or disintermediated, it is perhaps better to do this to yourself so it is at least somewhat more under your control even if you have to "allow your competitors in".
So, for example RBI has developed what appears to be an increasingly-successful B2B search engine / tool in Zibb; supermarkets are getting into this e.g. Tesco with TescoCompare.com; and, in retail, I'm hearing of plans from some retailers to create hubs/portals which aggregate content - in no small way to try and compete with, and emulate the success of, companies like ASOS and Net-a-porter.
Various brands are now moving towards becoming 'destination' sites which means they have to feature not just their products, but their competitors'. They're attempting to move further along the customer journey, to the research phase, for fear of being cut out or losing control of who directs the traffic flows upstream. Google, affiliates, portals, comparison sites, content-rich competitors and the like are increasingly probably just a bit too powerful for their liking!