Share your online checkout experiences

Put the "Continue" buttons for checkout at the bottom of the screen, not in the right sidebar. The sidebar location requires scrolling back up to continue, and it's not intuitive to look for that kind of button to the side; when filling in fields from top to bottom, the next step should be below (that's the direction all the information, and the user's eye, is going).

Also, I think it would be good if there were a way to add profile information that affects the sale during the checkout process (for instance, associate discounts). Having to back out of a transaction to create a profile, when that information is going to be entered during the new visitor transaction seems rather redundant. Perhaps have those customer information fields feed the fields for a new profile when a checkbox is checked to do so (the checkbox would prevent redundant changes or repeatedly created profiles).

On the store end, the store-to-home window on the kiosks I've seen is significantly reduced in size compared to the regular window, and it cannot be maximized. Can this be changed? Or, is this a computer issue rather than an IT issue?

slash and burn the whole thing and start over

Well I just pasted a whole paragraph on how to improve but the **** thing errored while loading and went grey...

Thats one of the many problems. The biggest problem is that each individual webpage has abotu 800 billion tiny little things to load everytime you click something. Theres about 1000 different fonts and sizes on the first page

The average user is goign to use the search bar, its goign to be 95% of your traffic. The main page doesnt need ten thousand different links and clicks and ads and all that little ****. your eyes dont know where to look.

The fact that it pulls up other items when you searchign which clearly have nothing to do with the itemt your looking for is smart from an advertising standpoint but until the site gets off the ground, lose that too.

I agree with teh above person, just get your web masters together for a 3 week pow wow with maybe a marketting and advertising maker on how you can make site user friendly and still increase sales.

Hell just get some one to do some QA on the site would help alot if your worried about spending too much money. Therse so many broken links and annoying errors.

What would you want to see if we were able to start over? What are the top 3 design features and functionalitites you'd want to locate easily?

How often do customers receive confirmations only to be contacted by the local store that the merchandise is out of stock and needs to be ordered?

fast simple loading none of this java **** that takes 5 min to load a page all the way

With all the questions being flashed on the cash register screens, the time it takes to buy something "in-person" v.s. online is quickly converging.

Was at the store looking for kids shoes.  They didn't have my son's size they offered to log me in to the website so I could get free shipping.  I searched by size, found what I wanted, and put it in the cart but it was out of stock.  Thought I did something wrong, so I searched by size again and put a different pair of shoes in the cart.  Again, out of stock.  I got annoyed and left.

Isn't the whole point of point of searching by size that I only what shoes in that size?  Shouldn't out of stock items be eliminated from the search to begin with?

The main issue with that is the website doesn't know where the shoes (or pants, or whatever) are going until you've put in your shipping information. That's why it still shows up (unless it's out of stock nationwide, which things very rarely are). If an item that's out of stock in one area was eliminated from the site despite being available elsewhere, nobody else would be able to purchase that item until everybody everywhere was able to buy that item. That's not really a practical solution. While it's an inconvenience, admittedly, it's not an uncommon thing to happen with regional warehouse distribution systems.

there is a beta site for sears, at beta.sears.com. I tend to like it, and it is better than the older site - however it seems that the beta site shows up sometimes and other times, the older one. 

It would be more helpful to keep the beta site for testers or people who opt to use it, and leave the site for the majority of traffic alone - I cant see many older shoppers being happy if the site is changing every so often on them.

As far as the site goes, I don't have any suggestions because I also think amazon itself is a cluttered mess. Maybe I am also interested in seeing a more simple, clean interface with snappier content that allows a user to really find the item and product info, and reviews in one screen, and lose the huge scrolling.

I purchased an item on Lands' End, but had to put in a new registration for that site alone, which seems kind of silly because I thought my sears login would be enough to work... just another idea, to keep things simple.

Some of the problems are some people still have outdated browsers, and a lot of people are having Javascript issues with older IE browsers.

For the Sears database, more tags are surely needed as it must be the reason why its so hard to find different items.

Stick to continuing the progression of the site through Javascript as it will pay off in the future and is more efficient. There will be lots of bumps in the road but hey people dont understand the time and frustration that comes with building a website. I also would say once more of the bugs are ironed out look into some basic AJAX implementation in cart areas, and ohh almost forget increase the system timeout time for entering address, etc.

Being able to add employee discount and Craftsman Club information, at check-out time, would simplify the checkout process - similar to the Guest purchase option.

Creating a Profile, with yet "another password" is another thing to forget.

If someone knows the employee number and has their Craftsman Club number handy (or memorized), why make the process longer and more complicated?

you can add Craftsman club numbers at checkout, it goes into the reward clubs section right above your payment area.

You still need to have a profile with Assoc discount to get it, which makes sense.

I looked at the basic source code of the beta site, I saw an iframe element tag, I thought that was d-listed by the w3c.

Someone still uses HTML frame tags?

Wow!