Kmart online sales are down a staggering 44% year to date versus last year. Numbers like that should have a lot of people severely contracting their anal sphincter and screaming, OH SH*T!!!
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When the online orders come shipped in boxes that once had Tide detergent in them then you know that online is not a priority. Or when the shipping is almost as much as the item shipped you know that online is not a priority. When the online orders sit waiting for UPS to pick up because UPS wants to be paid you know that online is not a priority. Or when online orders are cancelled right before Christmas or aren't shipped until tow weeks after Christmas you know that online order are not a priority. There you have it.
Sears online and dot.com orders are down 10 to 12% while all the other retailers are positive and trending higher. They can't use online shopping as the reason they are closing stores and stripping the store staffs to bare bones. The slow and systematic liquidation continues.
Many of the online orders depended on promotions to net the sale. Stores were unaware that members were getting $10 off an online order along with multiple promos stacking, which wasn't the intent of marketing. Someone at corporate saw the surge in online orders and decided to ignore the rest.
What about Sears' online sales?
We still do in store pick-up and ship to home. And it is still a disaster. No boxes, they tell us it is not in the budget. No packing materials, no one to pull inventory, no inventory to pull. The few orders we do pack sit in the back for over a week waiting to ship out. Shipping cost to much-- I shipped an item that cost $25.00 and it cost $15.00 to ship. No one will go for that with Amazon Prime and now with Wal-Mart ramping up their online. IT is over
I don't know if anyone else had this experience, but when the whole MyGofer nonsense started on the Kmart side, we actually did store to home shipping. Needless to say, it was already a disaster back then. Our stores were able to order boxes and packaging materials, but management was stingy even back then, and insisted that we just use found materials and boxes when possible. That might not even have been that bad, but then we had multiple associates who were assigned to pack these orders when others were off or were busy doing something else. I had seen orders waiting to be picked up by UPS that had a moderately expensive piece of electronics packaged in a box many times its size with utterly nothing else to pad it. Then they also expected us to ship out various flat-pack furniture, which most of the time came back from UPS in decrepit and unsaleable condition. Worse was when we had to ship some extremely odd-shaped items like wall mirrors or framed art. Then we had to waste half an hour trying to cut up repack boxes and wrapping them around the thing.
Toward the end of that fiasco, our management finally agreed to order some of the most commonly used boxes, which by then were only available in a very large shipment that took up a whole pallet. So, great, now we had enough boxes...so naturally a week later they shut off shipping from all of our stores and we were left with nearly a full pallet of now relatively useless boxes.
That, among all the other things that went hideously wrong with pretty much every program they ever rolled out, just made it plainly obvious from years ago that there really never was a path to recovery for this company.
Our store has either inventory double counting or out & out theft. Or a mix of both which is the most likely.
Sears/Kmart is running out of excuses for failure.
With the layoffs of backroom leads, the new part time backroom associates frequently have no idea what the hell they're doing. This is leading to merchandise that comes to the stores through either UPS or on the DC trucks just outright getting lost somewhere in the process and completely screwing up store pickups.
And kmart uses the excuse that people shopping online is the reason they are closing stores