Kmart

Full review
As with most chain stores out there right now, K-Mart has its own web-site where customers can find and purchase items online. If you are looking for a product that you would find in one of the physical stores, you are most likely going to find it on their site as well. The convenience of being able to order something from the comfort of your home (or business) without having to trek over to the store is the main benefit to someone using this site. I wouldn’t say that they offer great prices, but if there is something out there that you feel is competitively priced at K-Mart, then by all means give their web-site a gander. This was the main reason that we ended up using their site the first time; because they had a set of headphones that we were looking for at a very reasonable price. Since we wanted to order 5 pairs of them, the purchase made sense, and off we were on our great K-Mart online shopping excursion.

The site itself is nothing special, and because of their color scheme (red and white) some of the screens are actually difficult to read. The management needs to spend more time making the site user-friendly, because when you look for things like extraneous charges or shipping fees, it is really difficult to find what you are looking for. Their main FAQ’s page on shipping is in a pop-up browser window that doesn’t have a scroll tab. This means that you cannot get to the bottom of the page, and will never know what your shipping options are until you check out. For someone trying to say ahead of the curve this can be very frustrating, and I know I was stumped as to how exactly shipping charges are accrued. They of course do have a chart, but some of the information isn’t really discernable. Suffice it to say, you can choose their standard rate, a premium rate, or an overnight rate on any of your purchases from the site. My only guess about what the premium rate might be is that this is the 1 to 3 day option which costs at a minimum double what the standard rate is listed.

When you have selected the products that you wish to purchase, and have loaded up your cart, you can proceed to the check-out and see a total cost for your purchases. This total is the items added to their estimated shipping totals. Keep in mind that this total is before they add any taxes into the equation, so you are looking at a certain percentage of increase when you get to the final purchase screen. For our purchase of just over $51, on products weighing between 2 and 3 pounds combined, the shipping charged was $5.98. This was for their standard shipping, and an estimated arrival date of 3 to 5 business days. Not all that bad for a purchase online I think, but at the same time, that total price is nowhere to be found on their shipping charts. They charge by weight, and according to their listing, it goes up per pound by a couple of dollars. This could lead to some expensive shipping costs, but since our charge was lower than the $6.25 they had listed, I didn’t see the point in complaining about it. For someone that might order a large purchase weighing 10 pounds it would cost $8.95 and for 15 pounds it is $9.95 just for a point of reference. It keeps building depending on how much total weight your purchases have accumulated.

Checking out and making that final purchase was easy enough with a MasterCard credit card, and a confirmation e-mail was sent to use right away confirming that the purchase was made. The thing lacking from all these confirmation pages was an estimated arrival date of the product, and we were left to guess that it would probably just be here in 5 days. For customers trying to keep tight schedules, something like this might not be exemplary from an online source. The package did get here, in perfect condition, the following week, and it left us satisfied with the overall experience we had under-taken. It has left me with some second-thoughts about going back to the web-site though, and unless they had a product that nobody else had, and it was on sale, I don’t think I would want to purchase something from them in the near future. They fulfilled our order, they got the product to us on-time, and they did so without any excuses or problems. From that standpoint our encounter with Kmart.com was a successful one, but the set-up of the site, my inability to find out charges before the purchase, and the frustrating screens where you couldn’t read anything compiled to be detractors for future business on this site. I think I can safely recommend them as an online source, but be weary of all the potentially frustrating items that I mentioned.