Sears’ new mobile presence is meant to makes it easier to cut out the holiday shopping hassles and shop from the convenience of a mobile phone. The mobile site at http://www.sears.com is powered by Usablenet.

“The strategy for Sears is to extend the benefit of their Web site to handheld browsers,” said Jason Taylor, vice president of mobile products at Usablenet, New York.

“Sears realized that a lot of its customers have the ability to interact with their brand and its Web site over the mobile Web,” he said.

Sears Holdings Corp. is the nation’s fourth largest retailer with over $50 billion in annual revenues and approximately 3,800 full-line and specialty retail stores in the United States and Canada.

Key proprietary brands include Kenmore, Craftsman and DieHard, and a broad apparel offering, including such well-known labels as Lands’ End, Jaclyn Smith and Joe Boxer.

Sears2go lets customers select products from a wide variety of categories, including apparel, electronics and computers, fitness and sports, jewelry, tools, toys and games with home delivery or in store pickup.

After buying an item on Sears2go, shoppers picking up their order in store will receive a text-message alert when their merchandise is ready for pick-up.

Consumers can also text SHOP to 73277 and they receive a link back to the mobile site.

Additionally, users can then opt-in to receive promotions from Sears right to their mobile phones.
Users just need to text DEALS to 73277 to receive Sears Deals Alerts.

Many of the same features available on Sears.com will be available through Sears2go, providing a streamlined, consistent experience.

Functional features, such as product search and browsing, shopping cart and checkout, gifts, product reviews, store locator, special offers and order status make mobile shopping just as easy as shopping online.

All payments made via mobile are secured with the same technology as on the Sears Web site.

“In Sears’ continued effort to innovate and serve our customers as they adopt new technologies,” said Ravi Acharya, director of ecommerce at Sears, Hoffman Estates, IL.

“More and more customers are using their mobile phones to shop online and Sears2go is completely geared for mobile devices with an emphasis on speed and usability,” he said.

Usablenet is a fully managed service that leverages the features and functionality of a company’s existing Web site and extends it to all mobile devices worldwide in less than six weeks, requiring no client IT or Web design resources.

“Our mobile Web platform provides Sears with a new channel to extend marketing and commerce,” Mr. Taylor said.

“A big driver in terms of timing of the launch is the fact that we are in the holiday season,” he said.