Kmart Arriving Stylishly Late to E-Commerce

Kmart Corp. is just now getting around to opening a full-fledged online store, years after other e-tailers began extolling the supposedly unbeatable advantage of being a “first mover.” But now that many of the first movers have gasped their last breath, or are flailing about in a sea of red ink, Kmart does not look so foolish for taking its time. The launch this week of BlueLight.com, a San Francisco company that is majority-owned by Kmart, comes at a time when a lot of the competition is disappearing. BlueLight also began offering free Internet access six months ago and already has signed up 2 million subscribers, many of them the middle-income, middle-America customers it is targeting to shop at its online store. Kmart’s late arrival to the Internet was not so much a strategic move as it was bad planning. The company actually had tried its hand at e-commerce twice before, but the sites it launched were so poorly executed that they were abandoned before they made much of an impact. On Friday, shares of Troy, Mich.-based Kmart fell 6 cents to close at $7.63 on the NYSE.