Sears to sell Craftsman to Stanley/B&D

[Jack]

After a thousand years of on line sales you would think they would be better at it...

[DerbyDad03]

I didn't start making stuff up until they annoyed me by constantly asking for the same info. I even mentioned (more then once) that they already had my info.

"Why do you ask me all the same questions every time I come in?"

"That's how the system works, sir. May I have your name please?"

Eventually, I figured that if my real info wasn't being retained, I might as well just give them whatever I wanted.

[Jack]

Amazon as well, and if buying enough stuff for free shipping, you have to be very careful the "partner" isn't gouging you on shipping which isn't included in the free shipping part. Amazon can make it a bit confusing to say the least, and thus, more diligence required, the less trust they get.

[DerbyDad03]

I recently had a situation where I bought a $42 item and got a message saying that if I added a $7 item I could get free shipping. I found a blade for my oscillating tool that was labeled as an "add-on" item, one that Amazon describes as:

"The Add-on program allows Amazon to offer thousands of low-priced items that would be cost-prohibitive to ship on their own."

I put it in my cart and my shipping cost was reduced to $0.

I then received 2 different emails, one for each item, with different tracking numbers and different delivery dates. The $42 item arrived last Friday, the $7 item arrived yesterday. So much for their "cost-prohibitive to ship on their own" criteria.

[Leon]

Have you looked at their P&L sheet? Their internet sales may very well be what is making money. Speculation does not override the facts on the balance sheet. The over saturated brick and mortar locations are certainly a loosing proposition with few to no customers in the many of the locations.

And the holding company may be totally at fault. It could very well be robbing Peter to pay Paul/KMart. Sears was making money and not that long ago. The losses in the last 20 quarters would choke any horse. If Sears has had losses for every quarter in the last 5 years there must have been profits prior to that.

[Leon]

Yes Amazon as well. I would suggest not dabbling in what you don't understand. Like those $1.99 shelf brackets that are more expensive than the Prime brackets once you add in the shipping.

[Leon]

Must have been a location thing.

[Jack]

Business is seldom easy unless you have a monopoly. I think it's easier for a multi-billion dollar retail company to set up an on line business than someone with no money, no sales experience, no products and so on.

I bought my earphones a few months ago on-line from Walmart, not Amazon, so they are doing something about it. IF they get it wrong, they will run into problems, just like everyone else. As fast as on-line sales is growing, retail stores are dying. That's why I say hindsight is not it, it is now, get with it now or die a slow death. If you can't get on-line sales to work, you better get new people that know how to get it working. Sears didn't, but they were killing their business before on-line came into being, so no surprise there.

I think catalog sales and online sales are almost identical. On-line is cheaper and easy to keep up to date. Today, people occasionally go to a retail store if in a super hurry, bored, or want to physically see and touch a product before ordering it on-line.

[Jack]

Yes, that's what they did to everyone around here, and they did it for many, many years and in different stores, so it seemed to be a company policy that was poorly implemented. Rockler, HF and others do it with no annoyance.

[Jack]

You missed the part where he said "Shouldn't just a phone number bring everything up" If that worked, we wouldn't be bitching about the annoyance they caused.

If your RS only wanted a Phone number, they should have passed that secret on to the rest of their stores. Apparently they were not smart enough to do that, or were _you_ getting special treatment?

[Leon]

If I shop at RS and my wife shops at RS and my son Shops at RS and we all give RS our own unique phone number and a common address there has to be a way to differentiate us, hence the questions to narrow down who is being sold to. Then enter into the mix phone number changes, new addresses.

Typically is in such a hurry that he does not wait to have the information updated and you have to go through this process each time.

I do this every time at Woodcraft. I have a taxable account and business non taxable account and to make it easier to differentiate I tell them to pick the one that references my or or my wifes name depending on whether the sale is taxable or not. Both of our phone numbers and old land line number pointed to the same two business accounts.

[-MIKE-]

When I still had a Radio Shack within driving distance, it got to the point where I was getting 3 mailers all to the same address, because inevitably whichever salesman on that particular day didn't know how to use the computer and would re-enter my info on a new account.

The last time they tried to tell me they needed my name for the sale, I just said, "You make it a cash sale or you don't get the sale."

[Leon]

I have noticed that too but to be fair, I see it happen on all prime orders regardless of cost too. You have to think that Amazon is loosing money on items that sell for $5 and have free second day delivery.

They cannot look at each individual sale and determine the logistics for each. They had to come up with a happy medium. Some times it works out better for them, sometimes it does not. If they analyze each order and make each order work in their favor customers will get tired of the math.

[Puckdropper]

Jack wrote in news:o5arsn$i02$ [e-mail]:

I've never been confused as to what was included or not included with shipping. The big Prime logo or fulfilled by Amazon means it's free shipping if you qualify, and if it's not the shipping price is stated clearly on the page.

Add On items are clearly indicated as well, as annoying as they can be sometimes. (They're not included with Prime Shipping benefits, you still have to have that minimum purchase amount.)

Puckdropper

[Jack]

I'd suggest not dabbling in what you don't understand. Like Sears charging 79 cents for shelf brackets that I bought from Amazon for 5 cents. Shipping may or may not be an issue. In your case, the shipping didn't bring the cost up to near what Sears was charging at the store, which was the original point.

Amazon prime issue is different, my issue with that is I have seen them sell the exact same item for more money under prime than not prime. So the free shipping was not as free as they let on, breeding lack of trust for their sales tactics. Worse, increased diligence needed just when it harder to muster as age creeps up. Perhaps a class action age discrimination suit would be cool.

[Scott Lurndal]

Since neither of you seem to have any experience with online retailing, perhaps you're both tilting at windmills.

[-MIKE-]

Most of the time the only difference between what they offer with free shipping or paid shipping (same with Prime stuff) is what they carry in their regional warehouses. Those Amazon delivery drivers pack their vans full of stuff for delivery all to the same part of town (just like UPS drivers) and head out from the regional warehouse.

The other thing that allows then to offer free shipping is their relationship with the USPS. They negotiated an insane shipping discount with the USPS because of the millions and millions of packages they ship every year. It's kind of like junk mail. Without junk mail, the USPS would be bankrupt. Did you ever notice that the USPS now delivers Amazon on Sundays?

Many don't realize this, but you can sell your used stuff on Amazon. They'll send you a pre-paid shipping box and you send your stuff to them, they sell it and you get paid. It might not be as much as you'd get selling it in a private sale, but you didn't really have to do anything. Plus, you get to clean out your closets. :-)

[Leon]

Granted there is a lot I do not understand with on line retailing but I do have a lot of shipping experience and understand why certain conditions for shipping and stocking item prices don't seem to be consistent. Having been the GM of a wholesale distributor I set the margins and rules for pricing and shipping, and the volume of business the customer did with that changed that matrix. That was 20+ years ago but margins are margins and profit is profit regardless of when.

It just seemed that Jack was comparing different prices on Amazon for the same thing and apparently not noticing that a low price, that does not include shipping, was more expensive than the Prime item which included shipping.

Granted again prices are all over the board on Amazon. While Prime is expensive up front each year, $99, that gets whittled away quickly if you need items quickly and actually pay extra for 2nd day delivery.

Prime is good for some and so much for others.

[Larry Blanchard]

I think this came up once before, but I'm curious. The above two paragraphs showed up as two long lines in my Pan newsreader using Linux. When I highlight them and click on follow-up, they appear in the follow- up window as they do above. I did not have to reformat them.

This never used to happen. My only clue is that the message seems to have been posted from google groups although the path (shown below) does include a mismatch. Was there a cause determined for this phenomenon?

Path: aioe.org!feeder.usenetexpress.com!feeder1.iad1.usenetexpress.com!

216.166.98 .84.MISMATCH!border1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com! r185no702533ita.0!news-out.google.com!78ni11656itm.0!nntp.google.com! r185no702988ita.0!postnews.google.com!glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com! not-for-mail

[DerbyDad03]

If you need to pad an order to get free shipping, you can search for low priced items by using generic search terms such as:

filler items under 20 or add on under 15

You can even be more specific by using terms like "tools under 7"

It's not perfect in that you may get some higher priced items, but it narrows the selection to make padding the order much easier.