As the holiday shopping fervor escalates to DefCon One status, retailer Sears Holdings is hoping to appeal to time-starved consumers with a new iPhone “Sears Personal Shopper” app that can put both technology and Sears’ expert shoppers to work for time-starved consumers.
The new app, available free from the iTunes App Store, lets users take a photo of an item they want from anywhere, including from competing multibrand merchants. The app sends the photo as a multimedia message to Sears’ Personal Shopper staffers. Those shoppers then go through Sears’ inventory to find the item or its closest match. Once they have found that match, they contact the shopper either via text message or with a phone call to the mobile phone from which the request was sent, explaining how the item can be bought and shipped.
Shoppers also have the option to click to call Sears directly and speak to a live representative who will help locate their item.
“Sears is continuing to help customers find all the things they need online in a truly revolutionary way,” said Imran Jooma, senior vice president for online at Sears Holdings, which is parent to retail brands Sears, Roebuck and Kmart, in a release. “We are one of the first retailers to fuse the right kind of technologies with our award-winning service that, combined, helps our customers find all they are looking for, especially as we approach the last-minute shopping rush.”
A year ago, Sears began offering a free m-commerce app for the iPhone, Sears2Go, that provided product search, price check and checkout functions over the mobile device. The app coincided with the launch of a mobile commerce site aimed at letting other phone users shop Sears via their handsets.
The mobile initiative at Sears is part of a broad push to integrate its physical and digital stores known as ShopYourWay. For example, users of the Sears2Go site or the smartphone app of the same name can find the product ready at in-store pickup within five minutes of getting a notification. If the store fails to come through on that guarantee, the shopper earns a Sears gift card.
By blending camera phones and human inventory search, the new “Personal Shopper’ app is at once staking out some of the same product-finding territory claimed by other retailers this season and establishing a point of difference by including the personal touch.
And by bringing people into the mix, the Sears Personal Shopper app also solves one often-cited user issue with the Sears2Go app and mobile site: namely, the length of time those earlier mobile efforts take to comb through Sears’ inventory from apparel to appliances and return a search result.
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