Sears.com Review

Late at night, on Sunday, October 28, 2007, I shopped on Sears for some kitchen items.  The kitchen in our new house was nice, but it was lacking in counter-space.  I am not sure what made me check out Sears because I didn't even know if they sold this type of product.  I trust stores that have physical locations like Sears, JCPenny and Target, so I figured I'd search around and see if I could find what I needed.

Shopping...
Browsing the site is so-so.  I found the products I was looking for right away, but was disappionted that the pictures often did not appear when I went to view the product.  Usually they would have a tiny picture showing on the search page, but no picture on the products page.  I got around this buy searching for product manufacturer #s on the web and was able to find better pictures.  I wanted to be sure I was ordering the right thing.

Pricing...
Since I was browsing the web for a photo, I also browsed prices.  This particular item was sold all over the net, but Sears definitely had the best price.  It was between $50-200 cheaper to shop here.  I trust the Sears reputation more so than a random online store so I stuck with them.  The shipping cost was pretty high due to the heavy items.  Too bad Sears does not sell these items in store!  I could only buy them online, so I just sucked it up and paid the shipping.

Ordering...
When I was ready to order, I had to be extra careful.  Every variety was listed on the page in one long list.  I wanted Stainless Steel and Natural Wood.  Instead of having a looooong list of the different versions, they should have had drop downs to choose your top type and your wood type.  Ordering was not that hard at all after that.  Just your standard web system.  I registered to be able to keep track of my order.  The receipt said the products would arrive on Friday, November 2nd.  I was amazed they would come so fast, but I didn't really believe it.  Regardless, my husband was going to be home all day Friday so I figured that was perfect.

Receiving...
We received the first part, the Kitchen Cart on October 31st sometime before 2 PM.  My husband got home around that time and found it on the porch!  This 150 lb item, that said "team lift" on the box, was left on the porch!  He managed to get it in the house but I still thought it was ridiculous that they didn't have to get a signature and left this pricy item on the porch.  It's rare I complain about things arriving early, but if it had come on Friday like the website said, my husband would have been here to get it.  By the way, we didn't get any emails alerting us it was shipped as we were told we would.

Friday, the day the items were scheduled to arrive, we did not get any bar stools yet.  The website still said it was in processing.  We ended up receiving these sometime before 2 PM on Saturday.  We were home, yet there was no knock at the door.  We only saw the bar stools sitting there because we were on our way out!  Once again, no signature requested.

The Products...
The kitchen cart and stools were in excellent shape with only minor complaints.  I know if I had a complaint I could go right to the local Sears to resolve it so that is a plus.

Conclusion
The truth is, the site isn't that great, and the shipping was a little screwed up.  However the products came extremely fast, in great shape and they were cheaper than other websites.  If I could go to a physical store to buy these types of items, I would.  However as long as these products are only sold online I will continue to visit Sears.com for my furniture needs.