• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 16, 2018

Sears became a brick-and-mortar retail icon, but unlike ecommerce giants such as Amazon, the company could not convince its aging high-value consumers to buy expensive items online. 

Jumpshot's traffic and conversion data for sears.com shows that Sears just couldn’t make it online. The data comes from a panel of 100 million devices, looking at more than 5 billion actions daily from January 2017 through September 2018. Numbers remained relatively flat year-over-year. They pay more to acquire less traffic.

From January 2017 through September 2018, Sears posted nearly the same transaction volume totals, growing at 0.03% year-over-year. And while traffic to sears.com declined 16% for this time period, the company managed to convert less traffic at a slightly higher rate.

Overall, the data shows that a major source of the traffic to the website came increasingly from paid-search campaigns and not search engine optimization or traffic direct to the site. Nearly half of their search engine traffic comes from search ads -- up from just over 20% during the same time last year.

The data also digs into Sears’ strongest categories online such as tools, appliances and shoes. It shows that just under half of all traffic to Sears comes from Google. Organic numbers fell overall, but when looking at specific branded categories such as tools, boots and appliances, organic traffic drove more traffic to the site.

Combined tools, appliances and shoes account for about half of all transactions on sears.com. These categories are led by Craftsman, Kenmore, and DieHard, three of the company’s strongest brand labels.

Sears did well selling tools online, averaging 50% year-over-year growth in transactions in 2017 for the category. It ranked No. 5 as a domain in the tool category behind Amazon, Home Depot, Lowes, and Walmart.

These "private labels" that earned consumer trust, similar to AmazonBasics, per the research, at one point threatened to push out established brands and manufacturers who sell through the store.

Private labels worked for Sears to increase sales online, but 84% of all purchases of tools on the site was driven by one brand, Craftsman, which now represents about one-fifth of all sales on sears.com.

One of the major problems facing Sears, per the study, is that while brand loyalty is prevalent mostly among older generations, it is not strong among millennials and others.  

Sears appliance sales are dominated by its own brand, Kenmore, which drives 62% of all appliance sales on the site. Appliance sales have been flat, down 0.1% year-over-year through the end of third-quarter 2018.

Unlike Amazon, Sears just could not compete online when it came to selling high-value items like appliances and tires. The retailer ranked No. 17 among a variety of other retailers and most of the traffic they do have is on a few keywords tied to legacy brands such as DieHard boots.

Four of the top six keywords lead to product pages listing shoe on the Sears site, For example, the keyword “sears” drove 82.77% of traffic, followed by “diehard work boots” at 81.41%. The keywords “sears diehard boots” drove 59.44%.

Analyzing Sears compared with other e-commerce and retail sites, Amazon leads with 92.5% conversion share. Rounding out the top five, homedepot.com took 2.7%; with walmart.com at 1.5%;  sears.com at 1.3%; and lowes.com at 1.1%.