Sears joins Amazon, Wal-Mart in opening site to third party sellers |
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Sears is upping its ecommerce game against Amazon.com and Wal-Mart. The department store chain officially launched its new Marketplace program today, opening its website to third-party sellers. Sears says it now offers 10 million products from 1,500 sellers online.
Sears is following in the footsteps of Amazon and, more recently, Wal-Mart, which have used third-party merchants to vastly expand their product selections.
Amazon opened its website to other retailers a decade ago. Brick-and-mortar giant Wal-Mart announced a similar program in August, teaming with select retailers to add more than a million items to its online store.
Wal-Mart, Sears and other big retail chains lag Amazon in ecommerce sales and have been seeking to catch up through online discounting and changes to their websites.
Sears said it will compete against third-party retailers on its website, saying "multiple sellers of the same item are included on the site, regardless of whether Sears sells a similar item."
Amazon doesn’t break out the dollar value of third-party sales, but they made up 31 percent of the overall unit sales in the third quarter of 2009, according to a regulatory filing. Amazon said more than 1.8 million seller accounts were active on its site worldwide in Q3, up 24 percent from a year ago.
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