Yahoo Autos New Tires Are a Click Away with Amazon and Sears Partnership
Depending on where you live, soon you’ll be able to buy any brand of tires sold on the Amazon website and have them sent to your nearest Sears Auto Center to be installed. It’s part of a service the online retail giant and the beleaguered brick-and-mortar dinosaur are rolling out. The tieup starts with a test phase that includes 47 Sears Auto Centers in eight metro areas: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Sears said it will eventually expand the program to all of its 400-plus auto centers, but a company spokesman declined to say when that will happen.
The Amazon/Sears tire-shopping experience should work like this:
1. Select tires on the Amazon website.
2. At online checkout, specify that you want the tires shipped to and installed at a Sears Auto Center. Amazon handles logistics from there.
3. Provide three preferred time slots to have the tires installed.
4. The nearby Sears Auto Center matches those times against availability.
5. Sears confirms the appointment by email.
Installation costs $16.75 per tire, including balancing, plus a rubber valve-stem or a Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) rebuild kit, a vehicle inspection, a road test, and disposal of the old tires.
This is the latest move in a curious partnership between struggling Sears, once America’s mail-order merchandising king, and thriving Amazon. Sears Holdings began selling Kenmore appliances on Amazon’s site in July 2017. Then, in December, Sears Holdings’ DieHard products, such as jump starters and battery chargers, were added to the retail website. The DieHard brand’s batteries were also added in February, and its own all-season Diehard-branded passenger-vehicle tires are now available, although the Sears/Amazon tire partnership is brand agnostic.
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