Sears Turns Popular Seasonal Mobile App into Year-Round M-Commerce Driver

Celebrating its 60th edition, the Sears Wish Book catalogue is in mobile format for the iPad for the second straight year.

The iconic retailer has been a fixture in Canada for decades and has made improvements to last year’s edition, which was downloaded over 50,000 times.

I sat down with Sears’ product manager of user experience Ryan Kennedy and their mobile marketing specialist Martin Routledge to learn more.

The Sears team worked hard to re-build the app from scratch for this year. They explained that there are thousands of products consumers can choose from with an all-new “pinch tool” that allows consumers to zoom in and out. Users will be able to tap on products one time versus three times and can opt to share the products through Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail and buy them through Sears’ mobile optimized website.

Other features include bookmarking products and being able to use the search tool to find any product on the catalogue versus just flipping through all the pages. Each family member can create their own wishlist and it is functional across all iPad versions including the new Mini.

The app is also now year-round instead of just seasonal like last year. Probably because it was very profitable for Sears as it generated additional evenue through m-commerce.

It is surprising that many other retailers in Canada, other than IKEA and the Furniture Store, have not really taken notice and continue to fall behind in the m-commerce race. Sears continues to be active in both the e-commerce and m-commerce space: the company launched a Toy Chest App for the iPhone that includes three fun, brain-teasing games for preschool kids.

Sears also has an Android app to browse over products.