7 ms·

Ironically they had the foresight, they were just too early/didn't execute. They ran an online service (co-owner with IBM and CBS) called Prodigy that competed

by cwyers 9mo ago

Ironically they had the foresight, they were just too early/didn't execute. They ran an online service (co-owner with IBM and CBS) called Prodigy that competed with AOL and CompuServ, and they tried to do online shopping there.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt 9mo ago
Everyone is talking like creating Amazon was some kind of low hanging citrus to be picked from the tree.
- 100721 9mo ago
  For a company that had Sears’ positioning at the time? It wasn’t far off from that description.
  - nrhrjrjrjtntbt 9mo ago
    But a lot of stuff had to be invented and Bezos was the person to do it. Amazon sounded intense to work for to get to where it is.
    - acdha 9mo ago
      They invented almost all of that a century earlier. Amazon improved their warehouse management and, later, delivery times but that happened later. If Sears management had been earning their pay in the 90s that would have been much harder because Sears had a huge inventory and unmatched local presence for returns, support, etc. if they hadn’t been AWOL moving the catalog online. Amazon was shipping at regular postal speeds then, too, so Sears could even have beat them if they shipped from their warehouses. This wasn’t uncommon back then: we had several clients in the 90s who just couldn’t wrap their heads around how quickly many of their customers would switch to email or online forms when it saved them a few days on the transaction.
- lumost 9mo ago
  People are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront. How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know, scaling the online storefront would have required Amazon scale investments which a dividend maximizing company was unlikely to do.
  - throwaway173738 9mo ago
    people underestimate how slow picture loading was back then. Online storefronts seem to live and die by their product images. It wasn’t really feasible to sell anything other than books until DSL came along.
    - acdha 9mo ago
      It wasn’t perfect but we had plenty of successful sites where most users used dialup. You’re talking small, heavily compressed JPEGs but it was manageable and especially important to remember that people didn’t expect it to be super fast. For browsing, it was slower than paging through a full catalog but still days faster than mailing an order and less stressful for a surprising number of people than calling an order phone line, especially if they weren’t certain about what they wanted. Web pages had room for a lot more text than a printed catalog, too.
    - toast0 9mo ago
      Online ordering from the paper catalog would have worked well enough to bootstrap. For items in the catalog, you don't need a lot of pictures, and they don't need to be big. If you want to have a few more pictures on a details page, you would put them behind a more photos link and show one at a time so you don't trash the connection.
  - dragonwriter 9mo ago
    > People are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront. [...] > How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know Sears discontinued its general mail order catalog (which had declined in relevance for years) in 1993, the same year NCSA Mosaic was released, while the web had about 0 public penetration and no commercial use. So, it wouldn't have been a matter of adapting the catalog business to the web, it would have been rebuilding it from scratch.
tracker1 9mo ago
After that, when the internet buzz was really picking up (around Win95 release cycle)... The prevailing opinion from their leadership was "the internet is a fad." and they just didn't try moving into that space at all until it was way too late.

by cwyers 9mo ago

nrhrjrjrjtntbt 9mo ago

Everyone is talking like creating Amazon was some kind of low hanging citrus to be picked from the tree.

100721 9mo ago
For a company that had Sears’ positioning at the time? It wasn’t far off from that description.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 9mo ago
  But a lot of stuff had to be invented and Bezos was the person to do it. Amazon sounded intense to work for to get to where it is.
  - acdha 9mo ago
    They invented almost all of that a century earlier. Amazon improved their warehouse management and, later, delivery times but that happened later. If Sears management had been earning their pay in the 90s that would have been much harder because Sears had a huge inventory and unmatched local presence for returns, support, etc. if they hadn’t been AWOL moving the catalog online. Amazon was shipping at regular postal speeds then, too, so Sears could even have beat them if they shipped from their warehouses. This wasn’t uncommon back then: we had several clients in the 90s who just couldn’t wrap their heads around how quickly many of their customers would switch to email or online forms when it saved them a few days on the transaction.
lumost 9mo ago
People are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront. How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know, scaling the online storefront would have required Amazon scale investments which a dividend maximizing company was unlikely to do.
- throwaway173738 9mo ago
  people underestimate how slow picture loading was back then. Online storefronts seem to live and die by their product images. It wasn’t really feasible to sell anything other than books until DSL came along.
  - acdha 9mo ago
    It wasn’t perfect but we had plenty of successful sites where most users used dialup. You’re talking small, heavily compressed JPEGs but it was manageable and especially important to remember that people didn’t expect it to be super fast. For browsing, it was slower than paging through a full catalog but still days faster than mailing an order and less stressful for a surprising number of people than calling an order phone line, especially if they weren’t certain about what they wanted. Web pages had room for a lot more text than a printed catalog, too.
  - toast0 9mo ago
    Online ordering from the paper catalog would have worked well enough to bootstrap. For items in the catalog, you don't need a lot of pictures, and they don't need to be big. If you want to have a few more pictures on a details page, you would put them behind a more photos link and show one at a time so you don't trash the connection.
- dragonwriter 9mo ago
  > People are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront. [...] > How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know Sears discontinued its general mail order catalog (which had declined in relevance for years) in 1993, the same year NCSA Mosaic was released, while the web had about 0 public penetration and no commercial use. So, it wouldn't have been a matter of adapting the catalog business to the web, it would have been rebuilding it from scratch.

tracker1 9mo ago

After that, when the internet buzz was really picking up (around Win95 release cycle)... The prevailing opinion from their leadership was "the internet is a fad." and they just didn't try moving into that space at all until it was way too late.