Published on Wednesday, October 6 2010
Email Invite from Sears.com
When I got the above email from Sears inviting me into a new social shopping experience, I hoped that they’d found a way to combine MySears and Sears.com together more contextually and pervasively, letting me move easily between the “get advice before you buy” approach of MySears.com (with its action verbs being join, explore, and connect) and the shopping focused Sears.com.
They haven’t, but what they have done is introduce more social functionality into the shop. Visit sears.com and in the utility navigation right underneath the multi-brand bar (Sears, Kmart, Crafstman, Kenmore, Lands End, etc) you should see an option which toggles between “visit our social site” and “leave our social site.” Clicking on “visit our social site” and you’re greated with this splash screen explaining the new experience:
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Published on Wednesday, August 5 2009
I was excited last month to see a blog post on ReadWriteWeb about Sears and Kmart adopting OpenID. In that post, Frederic Lardinois writes:
Users on Kmart’s and Sears’ web properties can now use their OpenID credentials to sign up and log in to these sites. MyKmart.com and MySears.com, which are both owned by the Sears Holding Company, implemented technology from Viewpoint and JanRain to allow users to use their login credentials from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Windows Live, as well as from any other OpenID provider. This marks one of the first times that such a large, mainstream online retailer has adopted OpenID.
As Sears points out in its press release, it simply makes good business sense for the company to allow its users to use their social IDs to log in to its properties. After all, not having to sign up for yet another new account on yet another site greatly reduces the likelihood that a potential customer would just abandon the process and head to a competitor’s site.
I’m a huge supporter of OpenID – and identity portability generally – and would absolutely agree that it makes good business sense to lower the barrier of entry for new registrations, in order to encourage more reviews, comments, questions, and ultimately purchases from end users.
But what exactly is Sears letting you sign in to?
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