Did you hear?… Mountain Smith lumbar packs for sale on Kmart's online site

Alert readers pointed out their surprise at seeing Mountain Smith lumbar packs for sale on www.bluelight.com — Kmart’s online site operated by GSI Commerce, formerly known as Global Sports. So we did a little digging. Mike Valvano, general manager for Mountain Smith, told us that its products were not supposed to be in Kmart’s site, but that since Bluelight.com was operated by Global which also runs Sports Chalet’s site among other, the product was somehow appearing there. Valvano also told us he’d requested the product be removed immediately. It was — finally on Monday, June 17, several weeks after Valvano’s request and four days after we’d begun our digging. In the course of our investigation, we also learned that this was not the first time specialty product intended only for stores such as Sport Chalet had inadvertently appeared on sites such as Kmart. Bob Leiwald, co-founder of GSI Commerce, told us that with 40 buyers and 350,000 SKUs to manage, these kind of errors do happen, though they are rare. He also told SNEWS® that corrections are made within 24 hours when the company is notified. When informed that Mountain Smith’s product remained on the site for more than a week, he expressed sincere dissatisfaction with his team’s performance and told us that this should not happen. In the future, if a company dealing with GSI has product appearing in an unauthorized site due to a coding error, contact GSI’s merchandising manager, Christyn Heinle, directly at heinlek@globalsports.com.