I can’t believe Sears totally fumbled this concept. Heck, they darn near invented it.
That’s because the board consisted of old fossilized idiots that couldn’t imagine beyond the catalog. And then when they did, they decided to kill the catalog with no replacement, figuring the stores would sell enough anyway. When they did realize people were buying stuff over the internet, years late, they didn’t spend the money to get a good website going - even today their site is a hot mess and trails well behind other major e-commerce sites.
The ‘best’ part of this was that Sears invested in and partially owned one of the first national online services, Prodigy - along with CBS and IBM. So it’s not like they didn’t know people were going online! Sears managed to screw Prodigy up too, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)