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Boo No More
morn writes: "Boo.com, European 'flagship' e-commerce sportswear store (maker of the distinctive 'geek in sportswear' TV and cinema ads) and largest Internet retail funding ever in Europe has financially collapsed, causing 300 job losses, according to this story by BBC News. The boo.com site is still up, and there are hopes that the firm will be taken over by a more established company. Nevertheless, it begs the asking of this year's favourite question - is this the beginning of the ecommerce bubble bursting?"
I dance a merry jig upon the grave of boo.com.
I interviewed for a junior help desk position with boo.com last fall when they were getting their NY office together... I thought the interview went really well and I even fixed the HR Director's Outlook setup. I was told that a second interview would take place when the VP-of-Tech-or-whoever got back from his honeymoon (who takes vacation in the midst of a crucial launch period?)
Naturally, the call never came. I tried to find out what was up through the Pimping Agency I was dealing with, and couldn't get a straight answer. Once the site was formally launched, I looked at it once and was glad not to work there. Apparently fancy LCD desktop displays and posh SoHo loft office space aren't sufficient for running a business
I ended up at a large, well-funded company a couple months later, and boo.com ended up broke. I WIN!
"It" is not like a normal store, since you cannot inspect the actual product and returns are more inconvenient. Mail order houses generally have sourcing advantages (i.e. they are manufacturer outlets). Also note that the mail-order market is very limited.
Furthermore, it is very meaningful when one of the most prominent and well-funded online stores goes belly-up. This is not "Joe & Bob's Annual Going-out-of-business sale." This is some serious shit. Investors have long assumed that having a well-established name and large-scale operation would be a major advantage in internet sales. This is incredibly strong evidence that big plans ain't enough.
My personal opinion: e-businesses can succeed. But the one vital ingredient is good management. A business must start small with a working plan, and build up from there. Walmart wasn't built in a day.
Nobody has made money doing clothing retail on the web. It just doesn't work. Maybe once we've got total immersion five-senses buzzword-compliant VR dongles it'll work, but for now nobody wants to buy a potentially poor-fitting ugly-in-real-life article of clothing. Even Levi's, with a relatively standardized product array, ended up pulling the plug on its eCommerce site last year.
Sure, the internet bubble will burst, but this won't be the incident that issues the clarion call. Right now what we're seeing is a bunch of people throwing money at untried and often nonsensical business plans just necause it involves the net. We've got to wait for some heavy hitters to run our of capital before we see a collapse.
butidontneedmytoothpasedelivered.com
-carl
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
Sure, teh design loooked good (if you could get to it) but their solutions put a lot of obstacles between their products and their would be customers wallets. That is seldom a good business practice ;-)
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Last August or so IIRC the fashion magazines were filled with editors singing the praises of Boo.com. They'd all bought Prada shoes there, it was new, it was hip, it was high-tech, all the "in" people were shopping there etc. The only problem was, even as the magazines were on the stands (never mind at the copy deadline), the website was not yet up. Must have been real tough ordering those Pradas, huh, Ms. Editrix?
Once it did go up, months later, the few from alt.fashion who returned after that debacle warned the rest of us of browser crashes a-go-go. Goes to show that word-of-mouth can work against you, too.
The telecom monopoly BT justifies it by making massive profits for its shareholders (profits are in excess of £1m a minute or something ridiculous like that).
The other telecoms operators (UUNet, NTL, etc) decide that it would be real nice to make a similar profit, rather than providing cheap internet access, and so charge similarly.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
c|net is reporting that >en. (Digital Entertainment Network) has informed its staff it won't be able to make its payroll. The site has retained an investment banking firm to start looking for a buyer.
It's another site that suffers from over design.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
when this started to hit.
I have a 144k DSL connection at home, and it was dog-slow even on that. It did have a tool to measure my data rate, and it claimed I had a 53k data rate, which was marginal to check out the "full" version. I went with the "full" version anyway because I was curious to see what it was like.
A clue as to the vast usability problems that were found on the site is that their "tour" was a condescending highlight-and-display of every single menu option on the site. It was slickly done, but too boring for me to sit through.
The actual shopping experience was sluggish, and despite using the high-bandwidth option, the product images were not large or distinctive enough to give me a good sense for what I would have been buying.
This whole thing reminds me of a friend of mine who created a very similar Javascript-laden "remove all control from the user" site. His site, like this one, was just about impossible to navigate. I felt a strong dislike for his approach, and I didn't feel any better about Boo, despite the massive budget.
I can surely shed a tear for the people who worked night and day trying to push this thing together, but as far as I can tell the site was, and still is, fatally flawed.
D
----
The overly-technical website didn't help, true. In UK, at least, most potential customers hve 56k modems, if that. I couldn't get the thing to work even with a current M$ browser. But there are darker things to come. A friend who works in web design tells me the buzz now is all about richmedia. By which they mean loud banners that scramble all over the screen shouting out their soundtracks. In a battle for our consciousness, they're simply upping the noise to signal ratio.
They also had some inventory problems, selling summer clothes in winter. Smart.
Yes, Internet connections are more expensive in Europe. But costs for staff and offices are completely insane in Silicon Valley. I doubt the Valley has any cost advantage all in all. It's certainly at least twice as expensive to do business in than normal US locations.
And still it dominates the industry. Not sure why.
Late last year I was working/chilling in a web developers server room and heard that boo.com had been hemorrhaging. There was mention of 10's of Millions of ££££££ being used to shore up the company. So when such ecommerce companies suffer financial collapsed it causes ecomonic ripples, something to think about when aproaching your bank manager for a ecommerce loan.
Guess I should'a placed puts against the stock
bty: 20ish NT4.0 servers and 2 token Linux boxs(1x DNS, 1x Quake2 Arena)
I had a SIG once... it was years ago.
I visited boo.com when the over-hyped site was announced and was appalled at once of the incredibly stupid web-design -- or lack thereof. It was just a huge bloat of features and useless animations (can't remember any MIDI or sfx, but then again I only have a headset so I probably didn't notice). Even though I am on a fast line, it was slow as hell and left little power and choice to the visitor. There was no way of browsing their pages through text-only HTML and HTTP. I remember thinking that if they don't change their webpage, they'll surely go bankrupt, or at least I hoped so.
Even their marketing strategy I couldn't understand. Why would people want to buy _sportswear_ over the Internet? That's one of the last things you'll want to buy unviewed and untried. Consumers in this product-area is very selective and sensitive. You'll want the right colour, size, brand and in most cases you'll want to _try_ out to see what you like. Think of shoes for jogging for instance! This is all very individual.
All in all, I'm pretty happy my conclusions at that stage were correct. Not because it could never become a success, but because they violated so much regard for consumers that they truly deserved this!
This should be a lesson to all that simplicity, flexibility and choice are three fundamentals of success in design in _all areas_. You may add as much bloat and features you like, but regarding these fundamentals will eventually scare people away. This is just one very horrific example, more will hopefully follow in the future. People will learn to avoid bloatware, since it's a cause of stress and disharmony.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
- big selection of stock that a real shop would find it hard to display, its the net so u can have a stock catalogue of 1000s and 1000s of items!
- reaonably quick and intuitive site, eye candy is fine if it doesn't detract from use
- backengine up to speed, that means transaction processing, security, info for clients, well thought out forms et cetera
- consistent navigation
- doesn't require me to have plugins and the latest browsers to use, maybe for value added stuff but not for stock searching and buying stuff
now thats what tends to be the case on sites that i spend money on, boo did not share much of this. nuff said really.Looking at boo.com, there are a number of things that adds up to failure. The first thing I was aware of was a major mistake technology-wise. They made a mega-hip web site that was simply too difficult to use for people to buy from them. I once heard how much this first version had cost them to produce and I think it was somewhere around $10M.
This should of course be plenty reason enough to get warning signs up. Anyone spending millions of dollars on what must be considered the core of the company and not having the knowledge to make sure it's functional is not someone I'd trust with my money. If it was a car company, there wouldn't have been a second chance.
Another thing you might want to consider is their business idea. Buying clothes online? Esp. relatively expensive clothes. Myself, I like to try clothes on first unless we're talking socks or t-shirts or the like. On the other hand, if I'm about to spend $100 on a t-shirt, I might want to have seen it first. Of course mail order companies have been selling clothes in a similar fashion for some time and are doing quite well. Maybe it's about the price or maybe it's simply that they know something about selling "on distance" that boo.com didn't know or care to find out?
The last and final straw is their marketing. Half of their spendings have been marketing related. That's over $50M in one year. This should be enough to brand your name in any small or medium-sized country. But what do they do? they market themselves everywhere at the same time. Really. I'm no marketing guru but wouldn't it have made sense to pick out one market or possibly two and start there and then conquer the markets one by one?
I doubt this is the end of e-commerce. But perhaps (we'd be so lucky) it will get people to start thinking about reality instead of thinking that the "e-commerce market" is a place wher eyou don't need to use your head to make it big. And perhaps venture capitalists will start demanding proffesional lead for companies they fund.
It's a nice thought.
I went to boo.com and it asked me to select a country, I selected "Spain" from the list because I didn't see "Espana" Y puedo hablar Espanol tan bien como cualquiera otra persona.
The US offers the most freedom to its people -- yes, including the freedom to go broke and lay off and fire people, who then have the freedom to have no healthcare and not enough food.
you call that freedom? in the US we have the freedom to be a wage-slave. why do we work soooo much?
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
Good lord, most brick and mortar stores with prices like that would go out of business. I saw a skirt for $380! Web shorts were like $40!
What crowd are they aiming at? The extremely affluent who like to pay more than they should for relatively inexpensive fasions?
Eh...
While I'm at it, I highly recommend everybody read everything at his site. His choice of subject matter is unique, his scholarship is impeccable, and his writing lucidly conveys complicated ideas.
whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
But it's not like that. Boo was a badly mismanged site -- their launch was delayed by five months due to technical problems, and they spent way too much on marketing (surprise!).
People have forgotten than 90% of Internet companies are supposed to fail; only 1 in 10 business startups of any kind last more than a few years. It's just that a whole load of Internet companies started up at the same time in the big, big boom last year and now the weaker ones are beginning to fail, but there are a lot of them. Investors got this idea that a Dot-Com was a sure investment, guaranteed to make them rich, and that's not true. Business sense, a solid business model and good management matter as much as they ever did. Amazon.Com is run by a businessman, not a geek, and that's usually the case for sucessful technology companies (e.g., um, Microsoft? Bill's more businessman than geek).
Unfortunately, no one will listen and even really good e-commerce ventures are going to have a tough time getting VC in the next twelve months. Eventually, it'll level out and there will be no difference between getting VC for an online business and an offline one (in fact, since all business will be online in some way, there will be no difference at all).
This is quite off topic, but here we go..
I really think that while socialism might hinder the economic growth (and economic growth is not necessarily a "good thing"), it is great at keeping the gap between the rich and the poor small. Socialism done correctly is probably the biggest reason that there aren't people without food here in Europe.. (Well, mostly.) What's the use of having a small unemployment rate if it means that some people have _no_ money at all? It's better to distribute wealth more evenly, if only a bit.
Call me a leftist, it is what I am.
The ecommerce bubble has already burst on Wall Street. The capital which supports new ecommerce companies is drying up. The reason is that the technical barrier to entry into the web retail market is very low. Ecommerce sites cannot maintain any advantage over established retailers. Sears, Walmart, Kmart, etc have all established web retail sites that are competative with the pure ecommerce plays like amazon.com or etoys.com.
Yeah, the story's getting a bit stale, but I thought this article on Salon was interesting.
- eddy the lip
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
One of the reasons cited in the article for Boo's collapse is `overly
complex websites', that most customers could not read. Some meat to
the `Viewable with any browser' campaign methinks...
I cringed at the notion of an Internet defined by commertal protocalls.
.. they are users who use the Amiga becouse that is what they want to use. If you don't wish to support them becouse of some notion of obsolete then Amiga users don't need to do busness with you.
Mind you the computer world was defined the same way but with one diffrence.
Companys created files and formats they would document. Standards of the future (hopefully). For the good of all.
But the notion of Commertal Internet Standards was standards controlled by the author. Closed standards. Undocumented.
In the past users wanted to stick with software that used documented standards. They don't want to be locked into the application. If the program no longer dose what is needed they need an escape hatch.
Todays users don't consider this escape. They think of now. If it works now it works for all time.
However if a company has sufficent userbase locked into it they no longer need to worry about catering to the existing users and are free to presue other markets letting the old features decay in antiqity.
This is the market today.
Part of this is in the Internet. Web pages designed for two web browsers instead of working on all HTML4 browsers.
Web sites with specal plugins that work only on one operating system and controlled by one company.
This should not be the future of the Internet.
I would like companys to rethink.
Classic companys have larg doorways that are easy to get into and out of. Easy to do your busness and leave.
Easy access for everyone.
On the Internet it's whatever a web designners notion of "everybody" is. Everybody uses Windows.
I talked with one designner. His idea was that the costummer base was wealthy and could afford high end computers and such so they wouldn't be using Amigas.
But.. he forgets... Amiga users aren't cash strapped
Such stereotyping notions of Amiga, Linux, Mac and Unix users is what is hurtting on-line busnesses.
Linux users are not all techno geeks and ISPs, Mac users arn't newbes or dumb, Unix isn't just for techno elite and Amiga users arn't poor.
I have a Dos machine at home set up as a web terminal. I don't need anything more than that for surfing the web. It dosn't do IRC it dosn't FTP very well it is still having problems picking up my e-mail. Thats not the idea.
I just wanted a box to surf the web from home.
Thats it.
No Java, no streaming audio no specal media at all. Just Dos and Arachne.
At work I have my Linux box.
Thats what I put my money... in my Linux box (I am so rarely home it dosn't matter much).
The notion that "Everybody uses Windows" is unrealistic.
I'm hopping that at some point someone gets the message. Designe for everyone or stay off-line...
I don't actually exist.
Dr Spong is on the money: e-commerce is just mail order in fancy dress. This scored against Boo from the very beginning: they were attempting to sell a product that had never worked in mail order in Europe before. There are plenty of direct sales clothes retailers, but for specialised niches (extra-large, extra-small) or just cheap, but none selling heighth of fashion stuff.
Moreover, Boo attempted to launch as a fully fledged multinational, with 300 staff and offices all over the world. It over-engineered its front-end - whether this drove customers away is an issue i can't answer but it certainly took a chunk out of the $135m startup capital by launching over three months late.
It isn't the end of e-commerce: it's just yet another bad business idea, badly managed, by inexperienced managers, that spent too mcuh too quick. There's a surfeit of these on the Net now, - expect a spectacular crash every few months. But the idea of e-commerce is still sound, it's just the number of jokers getting VC for a used toilet paper B2B exchange that's the problem.
-- need more time?
I think you'll find that almost every major sunday supplement has had full page colour ads for boo.com. The TV and radio ads were also highly prominent (assuming you watched or listened to the kind of programs that, in general, appealed to boo's target market).
tam (~boo)
I said that my country was Suomi and I got Finnish. Looks like it is in your local language.
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
it asked what country you were in. This was idiotic, given that the largest pool of visitors were in the US.
This isn't true; boo was highly advertised in Europe so had a far higher European visitor ratio than most .coms have.
Why ask the country up front? Why not wait until late in the transaction?
Because one needs to know how much something costs before deciding to purchase it. And your currency can only be defined if the site knows which country you're in. That was the whole point - to have prices in French Francs or UK pounds or Deutschemarks etc. as appropriate. The alternative? Imagine search results with a list of prices in each of the 19 or so currencies boo supported next to each product. Horrific.
And if you have different warehouses for Europe and North America, then advertise two separate sites, stupid!
So who gets www.boo.com? Should there be a www.boo.com for Europe and a www.us.boo.com or www.boo.com/us for the US? That alienates a whole continent. And if everyone uses www.<countrycode>.boo.com, then what gets shown at www.boo.com?
Forcing people to select a country at entry sucks. But having one universally recognised URL ending in .com for a global company is at the root of that particular problem. If, for example, people in the UK immediately went to <company>.co.uk instead of <company>.com then all would be well -- but they don't. Most people go to www.boo.com and expect to be served there.
If only we all.. had... per...sonal cli....ent cert.....ific...........ates..............
tam (~boo)
Somebody place a call to Lesley H Wexner. You know, the guy who owns Galyans, Abercrombe & Fitch, Lerners, The Limited, and Victoria's Secret. Les is just about due to buy another venture.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
If anything, the collapse of boo.com and the study should help the marketplace realize that it doesn't matter how good your idea is, execution is where the long-term money comes from.
Maybe we'll start to see a backlash in the IPO prices of dotcoms, now that it's been demonstrated that poorly planned, poorly run cyberspace retailers fail just like poorly planned, poorly run meatspace retailers.
--
--
...or am I missing something?
Well you're completely wrong. 10% unemployment rate doesn't mean that it'd be higher with a capitalist system.
they'll make more money selling their hardware through auctions than on all the clothes in their inventory.
1) Speed (Or lack thereof) - I tried it a few days ago. This is a site that wants bandwidth and plenty of it. When you get to the first page, your connection is assessed as to whether you want the funky version (read:slow) or the simpler version (read:nearly as slow). There's just too much going on. I connected on a 56k modem (like most home shoppers), but the assessment told me that I was going to have to use the simple version. Basically, if you wanted good speed, you were probably going to have use at least a 2 channel ISDN connection to get it. I've done connections using the fixed line at work, and it's still pretty lousy.
That immediately alienates the majority of home users straight away, who aren't prepared to grow old during the download. Most people are still using 56k modems.
2) From what I can gather, they employed at least 300 people and this was going to be the biggest money burner of all. If they had been more conscious of their money/resource allocation from the start, they probably could have lasted longer, which in turn would have given them considerably more time to start getting the money in.
3) The relative success of some sites is in their discounting. You are enticed to a site because of it's cut price goods. That's supposed to be the benefit of going to a site - the reduction in overheads are passed on to you. Boo seemed to sell at full retail price for everything. Yet again, another incentive not to shop there. I can go down the high street and get things for the same price, sometimes cheaper. What's my incentive to go there ?
4) Finally, their advertising was lousy. I only went there because I heard it was going down the pan. Ultimately, considering the marketing/advertising budget they had, I really don't understand who they were targeting. I don't have my head buried in the sand all day and I never saw a single advert. My colleagues say the same. I think they must have pitched the marketing very badly.
Ultimately, those commerce sites that have good business plans along with sound marketing will survive. In all fairness, I've heard statistics that 1 in 3 UK businesses fail in their first year, so perhaps this isn't such a big surprise. What's the big deal if 1 in 3 .com's fail at about the same rate ?
M.
- It's probably more expensive (shipping, etc.)
- The payment is potentially insecure
- I can't see the clothes correctly on the web site, and I can't try them
- I don't know if and how I can send back the clothes
- I have to wait before to get them
And the same goes for a lot of things. For example, I can't have a look at good look at a book online, and it's rather difficult just to discover other books. All, that, combined with the fact that my phone provider is way too expensive, and you will understand why Boo.com will not work before a long time. BTW, has Amazon.com ever made any profit?"Some 300 staff, though, will lose their jobs, 200 in the UK, in Europe's first major dot.com failure. Contractors may also lose out, several have reportedly not been paid for months."
You know, it's usually a good idea to pay your contractors, though if you have contractors willing to stay around for months without getting paid, they're probably not too bright to begin with.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Lot's of comments about how 75% to 90% of new businesses fail. But it's the people who can make or break a company. (If the original idea is good.) Boo was obviously not handled correctly. . . The people make the company.
But Boo were in the UK, and therefore using the pound and not the Euro. The pound is quite strong compared to both the dollar and the euro, which while causeing no end of misery for the manufacturing industry in the UK, means imports are quite cheap. Of course, while this also means that it would be more difficult for boo to export out of the UK, they should still have been able to offer the UK consumer better value than they did.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
The site is hard to navigate, slow and generally poorly designed. Lets not throw out the baby with the bathwater - ecommerce is here to stay.
You're just jealous because the voices only speak to me.
It seems to be haemorrhaging money also, anyone want to run a sweepstake on the lifespan of that one?
And for a more reasonable point of view on it, click here.
If you follow the link from my ID. You'll see that I agree whole heartedly.
If Julius hadn't been such a power hungry jerk consumed by fits of jealousy we might still have the library at Alexandria.
Keith Higgs
Digital Library Specialist
University Library
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio Home of this year's World Champion Cleveland Indians
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
I think one reason they have failed, is that the design of the site, while artsy, it's a little hard to work with. I personally despise multiple windows while navigating a site, and some of the features (try on???) are whack. I think they came out of 'feel good' type of decisions ("Ooh, our customers can actually try on this stuff!").
A web company is only as good (successful) as it's site, and if its a bear to navigate and shop, why would anyone purchase anything!!?!?
I got an unsolicited email from Boo a few days ago and decided to check it out. The site was frrrrrrustrating, odd, hard to use and didn't seem to offer any real DEALS, that is, their prices were not much better than I could get down the road in person. Other than doing everything wrong I guess it was an interesting exercise. They obviously targetted high end consumers who would be willing to pay more and put up with significant inconvenience to be early adopters and to be able to tell their friends that they web purchased. In the end something like this CAN work a-la L.L. Bean or Land's End but it has to based on a working business process model that already works. All of the back end stuff has to work flawlessly: logistics, returns, service, billing. If we look forward at the future of B2C what we'd find is that the companies that succeed at it will be the same companies that are otherwise successful at performing these functions in the solid world.
No, why would it? Just because an online store goes out of business, why would that signify the collapse of all e-commerce? Everytime a furniture store has "going out of business" commercials on TV, does that signify the collapse of normal retail stores? Of course not.
E-commerce (dammit, I hate that word, as well as anything starting with e- or i- besides e-mail) definately has some kinks to work out before it works as well as physical stores, but there's no reason at all why it shouldn't. It's just like a normal store, only the cost of running it is a bit cheaper. No different than mail-order stores, really.
--
There will be ups and downs, but the overall internet-retail market will have years of growth ahead of it. It will begin to mature, and that means some of the frontier nature will be gone, but it will certainly continue to be profitable and a growth industry.
I keep trying to explain to people that our economy right now is in "frontier" mode. For examples of what to expect, look to the international expansion of the US economy post-war (both world wars, really); the beginning of the industrial age; the western expansion of the US, etc.
In general, increased commercialization of the Web seems to be resulting in decreased utility.
Sites that I visit irregularly (dejanews, cinemark, etc.) seem to be less usable each time I visit, and the phenomenon seems to be directly linked to commercialization: the pot of gold (search link, local schedule, whatever) is crowded in among the ads, links to other sites they want you to visit, and the general clutter that comes from attempting to be a universal portal. Further, deep links directly to the pot of gold are increasingly impossible, since they don't want you to miss all the ads and stuff.
Finally, lots of the old fun sites (Anagram Insanity, etc.) are often shopped around, degraded, or dropped altogether, because suddenly the Web isn't a place to share and have fun anymore. Too many people seem to think there is something basically immoral about passing up an opportunity to make a buck.
ps - Oh, the irony. While composing the above, I visited www.phonetic.com to see what its current status is. As I recently mentioned, I always surf with image downloading turned off. So what do I see as text replacement for the image at the top of their page?
Gosh. D'yer think I should click it just to see what all-important image I'm missing out on?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
No, I don't think this is the start of the economic bubble bursting. This is a sign of an even more disconcerting issue for us Europeans. For the last couple of years our governments have been telling us the big Internet boom that has swept the states is going to happen over here (just a little later). This unfortunately is not entirely true, one of the great things the internet has done is sweep aside international barriers, you don't need one large book/sport ware/whatever vendor in each region for the internet, you just need one globally. The Internet bomb has not just been delayed in Europe it is not going to happen (to the same degree anyway). The US dominates the internet and change will be slow, factors like the metering of internet calls in most of Europe have slowed the take up speed and pushed us out of the critical window where we could take part in the 'boom' (UnMetered tariffs are appearing now but it is to little to late).
.. really, considering that they appear to have no marketing presence outside the web. Anyways, it's all a bit silly - they use Java as their eCommerce front-end. They have bazillions of useless cookies & when you finally get to the retail page, it says "Your boobag is empty"....
boobag???
Pete C (in Europe!)
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
When you read anything about starting a business, there's always some statistic about how 75% or 90% (depending how they measure, etc.) of new businesses fail within the first few years. Is e-commerce actually worse off than the average? Even if it's no worse than normal, it's going to seem worse, because they all started about the same time so there's going to be a wave of failures as they reach the "do or die" point
========
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
It must be a marketing problem. I've never even *heard* of boo.com. This is no indication of anything, except for a bad buisness.
No comment at this time
But some of boo's highly-qualified workers are likely to find work soon. Recruitment agents were seen handing out cards to staff leaving the building.
I hope that the managers and sales staff have as much luck.
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
It's not the end of the bubble; it's a chance to fill it with more air. E-incubators are done, now
it's time for e-creamators: consultants who specialize in poring over the flaming carcass
of your dot-com and pulling out the one or
two gold fillings of reusable work.
Does anybody else have the impression that there was a slight contradiction in their target audience? What's next: A brick-and-mortar shop that tries to sell wearable computers to jocks?
Say no to software patents.
I do not this that this is the "beginning of the end" of e-Commerce. With something as new as the Internet Economy, it's only logical that there will be some casualties... comapnies will come and go and eventually those companies that are viable enough to survive will do so. I just hope that the "press" does not start pouncing on stories like this and start claiming the end of the internet world is coming.
www.bow.com
and get this:
This domain does not have a web site.
It's a pronunciation issue.
No wait... maybe it's that the site launches another window that takes your navigation away and insists that the window be a certain size. I wish there was a way to selectively disable javascript "features."
I remember reading that when Boo.com came out, their page had so much stuff going on that it was distracting. I went there after the supposed facelift, and I still found it too much for me.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
-- it asked what country you were in. This
.coms have.
-- was idiotic, given that the largest pool of
-- visitors were in the US.
This isn't true; boo was highly advertised in Europe so had a far higher European visitor ratio than most
Largest pool, I said. U.S. population: 300 million, with a higher level of internet penetration than any large European country. Surely Germany doesn't have as many internet users as the U.S. And Finland may be wired to the gills, but it's got fewer people than the Chicago metro area.
Show prices in Euros and dollars if you really must put Europatriotism over sales. Hell, once you're using so much Flash anyway, have a discreet map of the (NATO-vicinity) world in the corner of the page that zooms on rollover.. do something. Or do as others do. Have a discreet pointer for switching countries. Defaulting to the US may be offensive, but until there's a bigger single market for a B2C e-commerce site, it makes business sense. And I'm well aware that day is at hand, between the rollout of the Euro and Japan's mad rush to net adoption.
Anyway, Amazon doesn't seem to be having a problem with www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.de branding. Surely that's better than doing a lousy job of selling to everyone.
why wasn't I surprised to see boo on here a month ago?
----
I think that the e-commerce suppy outgrew the demand. It's still a developing market, and everyone jumped on the bandwagon a little too early. Poeple are still slowly coming around to shopping online, but there are so many online stores that it was just a matter of time before some of them started falling away.
Got Rhinos?
Part of the pitch was that now you could buy overpriced sportswear in East Armpit, Ala. as easily as in New York.
Can't imagine why that didn't fly...
Web designers: TAKE NOTE!
What justifies these extreme costs? Somebody somewhere is making a killing on this, and at the same time killing the internet in Europe it would seem. I am not sure of the value of the pound, but it seems like I probably pay less in rent for my 2 bdrm apartment than you do for your 64kb connection.
I was considering moving to England or Scotland at some point in the next few years (always wanted to spend some time there) but perhaps not, if the future of the internet is looking bleak...
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
http://www.hoe.nu/text/hoe-0991.txt
Thanks!
-Mogel
The current Boo might be stupid, but I would do better! Let me take it over! I will open source their website and sportswear, get lots of money from investors, and inflate their stock even though we won't turn a profit!
I'll release the spandex shorts under the GPL so other people can make their own spandex shorts. But mine will have the "OFFICIAL" Boo.com logo on them, and we'll operate a call center for when people have trouble putting them on. But they'll only get support for 30 days after buying them, if they need help with daily use of their spandex shorts, they'll have to pay us a $125 per incident fee.
I'll be rich, I tell you, rich.
Web browsers have this neat feature -- if they don't understand something in your code, they don't puke; they ignore it. If you use this to your advantage, you have the best of both worlds -- fancy stuff for the JS/Flash/etc.-enabled, and the non-enabled don't know what they're missing. :)
That, combined with the above poster's design sensibilities, are the golden rules, IMO.
phil
It definitly had Flash. It had a little virtual you that would put on the clothes and let you pan around. It had a little virtual Ms. Boo that would comment (allways positave empty comments). And it was dog slow. And not from anything on our end.
Oh, and the virtual you? You can't tell what the damm clothes look like on it anyway. Your better off looking at the models (so you can see how the fabric really drapes).
Even if boo.com failed for other reasons, I like to think of the total lack of usability testing as a contributing factor. Or total lack to listen to the testing.
If the "bubble being over" means really bad sites like this dry up, I'm all for it.
This is only the beginning of what will prove to be a large trend. Most e-commerce startups will bever become profitable. In many cases, their margin on each item sold is negative. I do not believe that the purpose of many of these companies is to build a profitable business--they just want to be around long enough to sell stock--the one "product" whose sale does bring money to the company and its founders. 1 down, many more to go.
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
Boo.com went down because an online clothes shop is a fucking stupid idea. Very simple. You'd merely be clueless to buy combat pants and alphas, but you'd be an idiot to buy them without trying them on first.
The problem with the site being too advanced
is that it provided 3D rotatable images of the
products they were trying to sell.
99% (or some other large percentage) of on-line
buyers in Europe do not have broadband access.
Using the boo.com site over a modem is(was) very painful due to the high bandwidth requirements.
Of course, the main reason Boo failed was that its based on a stupid idea. How big is the market for geeks buying sports gear....
More seriously, I've bought a lot of different products on line, but I wouldn't buy clothes/ shoes or anything else that I would want to try on/ try out before buying. It was just a dumb business idea from the start.
Personally, I use rollovers and other Javascript toys a lot. However, I aim to make them a minor part of the page and use them only where they genuinely enhance the user experience, and with small footprint images. No full screen rollovers will ever be found on one of my pages, ever, period, end of sentence.
If you don't really have anything to say you only prove that fact by maxing out the special effects. (Does anybody know if George Lucas reads /.?)
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
Cost of internet access (and infrastructure in general) is a never ending story outside North America, mainly because of metered per-minute access.
For example look at the Middle East, where I am from and where I live, you will find a comparison of Arabs vs. West, which is part of larger site on the Internet in Saudi Arabia.
The only country that is forward looking on this is the United Arab Emirates, which just a month ago introduced Al Shamil ADSL, albeit at 103.25$ per month for 384 Kbps down and 128 Kbps down. In Saudi Arabia, I pay more than that per month for a 33.6 Kpbs dialup connection! No ISDN nor DSL in Saudi Arabia yet!
On top of that the service is very erratic and is of low standard compared to other countries. Symptoms include busy lines, disconnects, and slow connections. Check the Speed and Service Watch pages.
Internet penetration in the Middle East as whole is very low, compared to North America and even in Europe. Check my Middle East Internet Statistics web site.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
It doesn't take a genius to see that there is not enough volume in a market such as books or music for instance to support the number of stores that currently exist. Some of them *will* fail.
There must be plenty one or two year old e-commerce sites that are feeling the pinch right now. It can't be long before more of them fall.
How can *ANY* internet sales company survive in the UK? The VAT tax is going to eat any and all profit margin they have and then some. Why buy from some country that is going to slap on 20%+ onto the price when you can just go to another, more tax friendly, country?
Unfortunatly, the British are so used to the VAT that they cannot see just how much it is holding them back.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
boo.com has stunk on ice since it first opened. they were not available on mac's and the layout was a piece of crap. If this is the ecommerce model then it should burst like a ripe zit.
Still doesn't change the fact that the biggest, best established, and oldest pure e-ecommerce firm has never actually turned a profit.
If this was a mall-commerce(TM) bookstore that had failed to turn a profit five years and billions of investors money it would probably be called "The Chapter 11 bookstore" by now.
As the e-hype dies down and investors remove thier rose tinted glasses they will see that the E-mperor is rather skimpily dressed.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Although I was vaguely aware of boo and can remember a couple of zero-content TV ads a few months back I only found out what the company did after it had gone bust. The idea of marketting is to make your potential customers AWARE of what you do; Beneton can get away with not mentioning their products because they already HAVE customer awareness. They say 50% of all advertising spending is wasted; in this case it appears 100% was wasted. Nothing to do with the web; move along; nothing to see.
That's basically true, but the distribution demands are much greater in an e-commerce environment. When a user buys something over the web, they expect delivery within 2-3 days, as opposed to a mail-order situation which usually involves weeks between the order being sent out and product delivery.
That's a very significant challenge that many e-tailers frankly overlook - they need a scalable warehousing/distribution environment with the systems and staffing available to handle sometimes unpredictable demand. That challenge requires a great deal of investment and attention, even though it isn't as glitzy as a spiffy Java applet or $2 million Super Bowl ad.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Boo collapsed because it was an ill-conceived mess. Sure, it had lovely design. Sue, it had all sorts of interface bells and whistles. But it was a godawful e-commerce site.
Its home page didn't show any product or say what it was. It popped up a window that also didn't show any product or say what it was. Instead, it asked what country you were in. This was idiotic, given that the largest pool of visitors were in the US, and doubly idiotic because the US was at the bottom of an alphabetized list of countries. Very egalitarian and politically astute, sure, but idiotic if your goal is to sell, especially given that on average you lose half of all visitors with each click. Why ask the country up front? Why not wait until late in the transaction? And if you have different warehouses for Europe and North America, then advertise two separate sites, stupid!
Once you drilled down to a product through its lovely but tedious Flash menus, you had to return to the store entrance to pick another brand or type of product. In other words, to pick a shirt and then get a pair of jeans, you'd have to click "continue shopping", which would take you to the front of the store again, because menus don't follow you through the drilldown.
And the Flash. Flash is nice. Flash is close enough to universal these days to be justifiable on a commerce site. But Boo's use of complex framesets, multiple windows and multiple Flash elements per screen makes computers with less than 128MB RAM cry.
Multiple windows. Eek! A Boo shopping session is pretty crowded with all the windows it opens on a 1280x1024 display. Windows overlap on 1024x768. At least a third of all web users are running in 800x600 or 640x480. And those on bigger monitors probably have other windows open for other apps anyway. Ouch.
Boo was theoretically right in some of its design decisions. The mix-and-match clothing previewer is a keeper, or will be someday, as are the ideas behind the fabric zoom and 360-degree views. But the way they did it, over the heads and over the hardware reality of potential customers, was pure idiocy. The only serious interface change they made over time was to get rid of the "clippy"-like virtual advisor (also in a separate window). Adn I sort of liked that element.
I just clicked in BOO.COM and was very surprised to get an error page instead telling me to turn on Java...see link below:
a va
http://www.boo.com/needsomething.html?error=noj
I can't recall any other major commerce site that forces users to use Java...the people running BOO.COM must live in different universe since Java causes nothing but problems and presents serious security risks so many people including myself disable it.
In the end BOO.COM will go down in history as a case study of how *not* to design a commerce website.
As a native Alexandrian (the original one, not the fake on in Virginia :-) I am glad to see that some people got the historical facts right.
The burning of the Library of Alexandria has been wrongly attributed to the Arabs.
By the way, the Library is being rebuilt (I think it will open this summer) on the original site, and it is really impressive.
However, some works are sure to be lost forever in that fire! Very sad.
Another sad incident is when the Mongols (under Hulegu) invaded Baghdad (1258 C.E.) and used the books in the library as a make shift bridge for the cavalry to cross the river. It is said that the river was blank (from ink) for days! Too sad to think human heritage permanently lost.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Hey! Don't knock librarians! They've been in the information biz FOREVER!
Someone tell Jakob Nielsen, I think he has another test case. Next time I write to one of these firms saying "I can't be bothered to use your web site, fix it" I shall ask them if they want to be the next boo.com.
--
Xenu loves you!
I've visited their site a couple of times. First of all it's incredibly, in-cre-di-bly slow. They didn't do *anything* to make the webserver/site go fast.
Second, they use frames. And tables. And flash. And JavaScript. And img.src. And CSS. And lots of browser-specific stuff. Basically they designed it for IE5/NS4 and Pentium II or equivalent. Big mistake.
Because when people can't reach your website, they won't register. When people don't register, they don't buy. And when people don't buy you have no income. Simple as that.
The fact that boo.com is no more has nothing to do with any cracks in any e-commerce bubble. The fact is that boo.com was a bad site.
The lesson to learn? Don't use the latest and greatest in browser technology. Don't force flash, Javascript or anything fancy. Don't open any fscking new window. Keep it simple and FAST and your visitors will thank you in the form of visits and purchases.
the problem here is not anything to do with an impending .com meltdown. It's more to do with the fact that the launch version of Boo.com was possibly the worst commercial website in history.
IMHO, It was almost impossible to view without a T1 line, very tricky to buy from, sold clothes (clothes! who's going to buy clothes online?) and crashed your browser 4 times out of 5.
the Euro press, myself included, were predicting its downfall almost immediately after its launch.
Sadly, though, there is a growing feeling that Boo's massive cost (£100m) has poisoned the b2c market. No one will ever invest in that space again, and the entrepreneurs here are pretty upset at boo for that.
There's lots of specific information for this campaign at http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/
I've *never* seen such a good example of a badly designed web site. It goes against *any* common sense, let alone advanced user interface guidelines. I went there the first day of their opening, and I found it:
Overall, most of the junk mail I get in my snailmailbox is more useful than this crap site ever was.
The downside is that plenty of legitimate ideas won't get financed as a result of investor getting too cautious now. For fuck's sake, it was so fucking obvious that those people did'nt have the slightest clue what they were doing!
GO TO HELL, BOO.COM, AND STAY THERE!!!
The core problem with Boo.com is that it had extremely poor usability. People could not use the damn site without plugins and other crap running on their system. It was anti-minimalist and did not work on standard configuration machines.
Is there a flaw with e-commerce and e-business? Absolutely not. Instead, it is a failure to understand users and their needs. Buying online is painful enough without the bells and whistles. The bells are loud and the whistles pierce the ear. Give me a plain vanilla web site so I can buy what I need. Make it easy!
Of course I am biased here...
John S. Rhodes
WebWord.com (Usability Vortal)
How to Download YouTube Videos
[plus, any eCommerce site that has a ton of Java and Flash deserves to go under. It's like walking into a grocery store with blaring music, disco lights and only 3 aisles of products. It's cool for a second, then it's get real annoying, real quick)
D
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
Is cost. Pure and simple.
To run a large scale web site here costs a fortune. I run a tiny site behind a 64k leased line link, and it costs a fortune for the facilities I have, in comparison to my American business colleagues (*). I can't even begin to think what it must cost to have 2 redundant T1's (actually I can, and the cost is anywhere between frightening to unbearable).
(*) I pay £3600 (+17.5% tax) a year for 64Kb. My manager pays something like $40 a month for 1.5Mb down and 512Kb upstream.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
My wife is the reason boo.com failed. She's got high-limit credit cards, she likes to buy clothes, she's amenable to mail-order and Internet buying, and she's online (professionally and recreationally) for up to 10 hours per day. If she wasn't boo.com's perfect potential customer, who was?
But when I showed Debbie this Slashdot post, she said she'd never heard of boo.com and certainly hadn't ever bought anything from them.
Upon reflection, she thought she *might* have checked out the site briefly when it first launched, but found it unusable (because of all the Java). and didn't think their clothing selection was very exciting or that their prices were anything special, so she forgot about it.
Multiply Debbie by millions of other women online, and it should be obvious why the company failed.
- Robin
From Boo:
"This site is designed for 56k modems and above. It will work on slower modems, but your download times may be longer."
What they should have written is:
"This site is e-commerce site...it really is...that is designed for an auidenence running Windows 95 and 98. It won't work on other operating system. You need to be register so when we run out of money, we can sell your demographic information to the Gap.com. Our graphic designer have worked in print and are just learning what UI means...please bare with us."
-- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
I work for a company that's designing e-commerce sites and we were in the middle of coming up with design concepts when boo.com launched with The Buzz... everyone knew about it from industry press, etc. They had a great PR department and were well-funded, which is what made them "high-profile", _not_ favorable reactions from an adoring public. The site was overly tech-y, complex, and probably crashed half the browsers that visited it. There is a Golden Rule of web design (or any design, for that matter): Above All, Do No Harm. In the design of e-commerce, this can be refined as Don't Ever Get In The Way Of People Who Want To Spend Their Money On Your Site.
Boo.com eventually redesigned, but by the time Boo Mk.2 launched, I no longer heard The Buzz. My suspicion is that, flush with his/her buzz-generating success after launch, the PR person in charge at the beginning jumped ship for greener pastures, while the techs and a dwindling design staff, morale shaken by user criticism, scrambled to use ever-diminishing capital to make the site usuable on the second go-round. Just a guess.
Is the fall of boo.com a harbinger of the collapse of e-commerce? No more than RedHat stock's return to non-stratospheric levels invalidates Linux as a viable platform. Although I do think it's a harbinger of the inevitable return to earth of many overfunded companies flush with bright-eyed twenty-one-year-olds who think that being on the cutting edge guarantees their success and liberates them from such mundanities as user testing and developing a weatherproof business plan. Their ilk are numerous and we'll all be better off (and a bit wiser) without them.
"Luck is the residue of design" --Branch Rickey
I was looking around for good interest rates on a money market or CD and I found a 7.45% (yes, over 7%) 1 year CD over at etradebank.com. Many of the other online banks have similar rates. Little or no fees.
I have no idea what their checking accounts and bill-pay stuff are like because I'm only in it for the money, not the supposed convenience. But what's stopping you?
--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
The site was SOOOOOOO LAME.
It required Java and opened a mini-window,
was impossible to browse, and offered only
miniscule glimpses of product.
DUH!
A little louder: DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUH!!
Another prime example of venture capital squandered... After an extensive advert campaign, logging onto the site was less than ideal... Loads of excessive graphics, leading up to a painful account creation mechanism. Then when you finally get there, they haven't even sorted out http tunneling or whatever to enter text messages to other people logged on. No way of getting through most corporate firewalls other than port 80; and this feature was "coming real soon now but we won't give a delivery date"... So it was unusable from your work PC, agonisingly slow through dial up, hmmm, nice work.
And there did not seem to be any sort of revenue to be generated from the site, either - no banner ads or merchandise...
Still, I did fancy that bird on the dobedo posters with the navel ring... Anybody know who she is?
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Not only were prices the same as on the highstreet, but they had no Nike products. That's like a baker not selling sliced white!
Basically, boo.com had so many things wrong with it that I'm only surprised it lasted this long.
Yes, they regarded good design as being synonymous with the use of Flash, knew nothing about usability, and probably little about the complexity of their fulfilment problems, but at the base of all that was simple, old-fashioned inability to compete. I quite liked the ads though - but they were utterly awful at pulling in the punters.
G
PS: Talking of Flash - will www.moonfruit.com be next for a well-deserved diet prior to closure?
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Boo-Hoo...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Indeed.
But for dejanews, there is a simple answer. Just try typing:
http://www.deja.com/=dnc/[]/
and you get through 90% of the crap. It is left as an exercise for the reader to discover other options you can tack onto that URL to customize your web experience even more. :-)
Babar
A dot-com thinks it can make millions with an over-blown web site and a few non-e ads.
It's happening time and again: businesss-oriented people make stupid projections (sheer guesswork) just to bring in venture capital, the bankers then hold them to deadlines and targets, and before you know it, the venture goes to the wall and the ecommerce bubble is reported to be bursting.
It's all bollocks. These are extremely early days on a new business frontier, and whereas it's easy to see that the entirety of existence will be online in the fullness of time, at the moment only a wishful thinking idiot would hold him/herself to ransom through a banker's noose, to mix various metaphors.
The ecommerce bubble is not bursting, it's barely started to form into a recognizable shape. This is a ladder that will grow all the way to the stars, but we're currently on rung one or two. To say that it doesn't lead anywhere interesting at this stage is utterly ridiculous.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
they must be hating life today...
The reason that Boo.com went under was that they were NOT allowed to sell there clothes at a discount. This rule was imposed buy there suppliers.
Would you buy books from amazon if they exactly the same price as the High Street ?
per mere, per terras
There are plenty of direct sales clothes retailers, but for specialised niches (extra-large, extra-small) or just cheap, but none selling heighth of fashion stuff.
It isn't the end of e-commerce: it's just yet another bad business idea,
It was also the execution of the idea itself, actually. There is a niche, IMHO, for specialist high-fashion clothing, except that Boo's stuff wasn't it. I scrounge around from eBay to bluefly looking for certain ultra-fashion so-far-out-it's-timeless meanswear, so I have some idea what value there is, and Boo just didn't have it. None of their stuff was exciting enough for me to take a chance of buying it without having had the opportunity to try it on, I couldn't easily flip for items in a certain style or size, and the interface was just plain annoying.
Compared to bluefly that does offer high-end brands at very good value, which lets you make a personalized catalog based on your sizes and wishes, Boo just stunk. Bluefly isn't mega-out-there with their stuff, but their selection and presentation make up for it, and it even gives you the feeling, right or not, that you are getting a bargain.
I'm giving designeroutlet another try again, but for my money I have a btter time on eBay - and now that place is a crap shoot.
I buy most of the clothes that I wear from Gap.com. The really nice thing about it is that if I don't like something I can return it at the local Gap store. I haven't had to do that yet, however.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
I'm glad they are dead because they have a shitty web site. Requiring javascript and opening up a new window without my permission is stupid. I think this IS one reason why they died: users did not like the experience.
Phillip
However, buying something that's supposed to fit your body is not smart. There are variations in the manufacturing of each item that requires a fitting before you purchase them. Shoes are a classic example. I went shopping for sneakers with my wife two weeks ago. She tried on about four pairs, all of which were her size and looked like they would fit. However, only one was comfortable, and we would never have known that just by looking at them.
The same applies to a lot of the other items for sale, such as pants, leotards, and bikinis. My god, what woman would buy a bikini without trying it on first!?!?!?
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Okay, so a month ago, the bottom drops out of the linux market. Andover, VA Linux, etc. get wallopped, and hard. Slashdot is silent on the issue. Finally, after diligent work by flamers and trolls, a single article is posted on this. And posted reluctantly, with CmdrTaco indicating clearly that he believes stories on the stock market to belong on CNNfn or CNBC.
Now, a month later, this is posted, about a poorly-implemented, over-marketed, high-profile failure of a web site. Why? I have to agree with CmdrTaco, that the stock market and money games are pretty well-covered in other outlets.
Furthermore, regarding high-profile failures--they often do not indicate the failure of an entire sector. Here are some random examples:
As far as I know, people still watch movies and television, and buy cars and hardware. And plenty of money is made providing these things.
One of the many problems with boo is the price tag on their items. A site that took forever to load and even label queens couldn't afford some of the attire produced an e-business that didn't have a strong chance.
In addition, their business plan stunk like 6-day old fish.
The only thing this proves is that stupid ideas done badly by stupid people are not a good investment.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Over the past few years, I've grown increasingly sick of the spate of what have come to be called "dotcoms." For some reason ending in .com is supposed to mean something is a good idea.
Gee, whiz! They're selling Spam on a Stick [TM] and they're doing it online! Let's buy into the IPO! And idiotic ideas like this would rack up millions overnight despite being completely worthless.
Even now the tech-heavy NASDAQ is overpriced, even after the Justice Department's actions against Microsoft have depressed its stock and other NASDAQ stocks--for the wrong reason. Ultimately those stocks, after they split, will again be solid values regardless of the skittishness of the market.
If the ecommerce bubble bursts, good. The gold rush mentality prevailing in the market lemmings will do nothing but cause more harm in the long run if it isn't checked soon. Growing to rely on a bubble economy is dangerous, as witness Asia.
IANASB.
I went there when they were interviewed on
cnn.com, but my browser crashed.
Then I tried using lynx, and got the message
"You can't view this page because you don't
have java enabled.
After reading some of the comments here I'm
dying of curiosity about how bad their pages
actually were!
The economic rules are slightly different for dotcoms. Most of the cash they burn goes on advertising, the actual costs of doing business (altho' I haven't done any quant to confirm this) for boo.com would be much lower than, say, Nike Town. Once a dotcom gets funded, it could probably hang on for 6 months just by lying low.
If boo.com had worked out that marketing and advertising aren't the same thing, they'd probably have been a lot more successful. Consider a demographic who are constantly online with high powered equipment and plenty of bandwidth, have disposable income, and like to wear designer sportswear: the "new media" community, of course. Instead of the "viral" effect boo might of hoped for, the people who could have been their biggest market spent most of their time laughing at the site's ludicrous over-design - and everyone else couldn't get into the site at all!
just take a glance at the top 50 traffic sites or the top 20 in e-sales and see how many of these hip designs are on the list...
It's not funny till someone gets hurt.
Probably not the bursting of the U.S. bubble. Here, we take Internet concepts that should never float, and somehow get the lame concept to thrive in the face of outlandish odds (usually inflated by an IPO which inspires a "moon obelisk" reaction). Just goes to show that the country that gave you PT Barnum still believes strongly in what he had to say.
-L
On the other hand it was impossible to not have heard of Amazon (and I live in South Africa, not in Europe or in the US)
I can only assume that they had a rather weak advertising campaign, in which case it is no wonder they went down. A lot of people seem to think that these days you can just put up a web site selling some goods and suddenly you'll be rich. Hardly. All the same old business principles apply to ecommerce.
While a lot of Europeans are somewhat comfortable with English, wouldn't it make more business sense to use each country's language after you select your country? If I were in let's say Spain, and I'd want to buy something, I'd hope the site would be in Spanish. I wouldn't want to mess up because I missunderstood some description or set of instructions. No wonder they went out of business.
When Boo was first launched, it was critiqued on almost every web design list in which I participate. The overwhelming consensus was that this site had not been designed as a viable business site, rather, it was more of a portfolio site for the designer, i.e. "Look at all the stuff that I can do!"
Half of its "features" either never loaded, crashed browsers across the board, or didn't work like they were supposed to. That this site was ever touted as a real e-commerce site is just plain ludicrous.
Good ecommerce sites work. Bad ones don't. You can take the "ecommerce" out of the first sentence and it's still true.
Elsewhere in this thread, kwsNI states that the hype of ecommerce may be fading. This is not a bad thing - it lightens some of the pressure put on each and every high-profile e-commerce site, and lets them instead do their job - selling things to people. Maybe it's not so much that e-commerce isn't the rage anymore, as it is that it's becoming an accepted and normal means of doing business. My personal validation of this is that my mom, 75 years' old, using her first computer that I bought her in April, now banks online, bought her vacation clothes online, and used Amazon to send a gift recently. This from a woman who's scared to use her VCR remote! If that ain't acceptance, I don't know what is!
LisaBut, initially at least, a large proportion of its potential market was unable to access Boo's site because the website design was too advanced for most computers.
I wonder what they meant by that? I went to the site before it got /.ed and it seemed fairly ordinary to me. Malmsten and Hedelin did a good job with the mechanics of the site from what I can tell, but it sure looks like their rent-an-exec management staff made some very poor choices such as betting the farm on the value of board member relationships as the vehicle for capital, rather than raising capital by not overselling the value of the site/product.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Ticker CAIS CIK=010784040 0928385-00-001580.txt
Parsing EDGAR index page: http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/srch-edgar?0001078404
Parsing EDGAR filing: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1078404/00
Analysis for CAIS INTERNET INC filed 20000515
Start date: JAN-01-2000
End date: MAR-31-2000
Period: 90 days.
Multiplier: 1000
Liquid assets: 26952000
Income: -83497000
Days to live since report: 29
Analysis for CAIS INTERNET INC:
Based on data from SEC schedule EX-27 for the period JAN-01-2000 to MAR-31-2000, the predicted bankrupcy date is Apr 29, 2000 which is -18 days away
Or, in other words, what are they using for money?
I think it's a bit over the top to say that because one web site goes under, then the e-commerce bubble is about to burst.
That would be the same as saying that just because the shop around the corner is shutting, then retail is going to be abandoned, and we will all return to self sufficiency.
Also, if you look at Boo, and what they did, it's not much of a surprise that they went under. First of all they only targetted themselves at IE4 and NS4 or higher users, and for a long time the Mac was passed over completely.
Also, most people complained about the non-intuitive nature of the interface, and the aparrent difficulty in actually getting to the checkout (not to mention the speed, and MS office paper-clip inspired shop assistants).
So really, it's not that much of a surprise. As one news report put it, it shows that you should never put style over substance.
Find funky gifts
One big thing it needs to work out is usability. I checked out the site ages ago when it first went online 'cause someone told me how cool it was. Sure it was cool, if you liked waiting for five minutes for java applets that didn't actually add any functionality to the site to download.
And I just visited it now to have another look at it, and you can't even get into the site without java turned on. Brilliant.
Understand, I've got nothing against java or flashy sites, but keep it reasonable. Don't waste my bandwidth to keep your designers happy. And if you're selling, be damned sure you're site degrades well - ie, don't count on the extras (java, javascript, flash) working. To do otherwise is like not letting anyone into your real world store without a secret decoder ring.
My point? People are doing you a favour by shopping at your store. It's real easy to leave and go somewhere else, so don't try their patience when you're trying to close a sale.
- eddy the lip
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
I'd say less the bubble bursting and more a case of just a really bad site. The thing was too slow, too difficult to use and far too clever for it's own good. Thats aside from the fact that up until a while ago you wouldn't have made any savings buying from them as opposed to going down the high street. They could have done with reading The Cluetrain Manifesto
G.
Let's face it, geeks don't need sports wear...
According to the FT.com piece: "Boo.com co-founder Ernst Malmsten told The Financial Times that he wished the company had kept stronger control of costs. "We have been too visionary," Malmsten said." Obviously the rest of us are just too hung up on that whole usability/profitability thang.
Put the blame on meme
... is that people are still scared to use credit cards on-line.
Consider that we use credit-cards much less than in USA. For instance, it is not possible to buy something by phone only giving the credit card number and expiration date [ I always wonder: How USA firms and CC owners manage to hold off cheating?].
A few sites here allows customers to pay through a service run by the national Post Office: you pay in cash and only when you receive the envelope by snail-mail.
But I guess that this makes quite a dent in the site economy balance. And you can't count on out-of-country customers.
Ciao
----
FB
My bet: The big-yet-poorly-managed companies, like Amazon, survive, but barely. The smaller ones, like cdnow and pets.com, either dry up or get bought by "old-world" brick-and-mortar companies. The tiny companies... well, let's just say those stock options you've been working for in lieu of a real paycheck will keep you warm for a little while if you use them as kindling.
There will still be plenty of healthy Internet companies, though, once people figure out exactly how to create a profitable e-commerce company. (Has it been done yet?)
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
'e'business is like any other business. The flakes go bankrupt. Brand recognition isn't the only key to a successful business case.
Personally, I would bet money on current major retailers who already have neccessary infrastructures in place and for whom 'e'business is nothing but another channel.
There is a long list of "popular and well known brand names" in the "now defunct" garbage bin. If I had to point to a retailer which has the right idea, I'd point to Chapters in Canada. Their deals and good service has given them the totality of my book buying business... most of which, I might add, is now online.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Yeah, I went to their site. Once. About four months ago. And never, ever, went back. What crap. It was Flash Gone Bad. OK, granted a flash site is never really a good sign, but boo.com was way over the top and it certainly had an influence on my decision not to buy anything from them.
17 may - boo.com
18 may - boo-hoo.com
gotta be at least a -3 :)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
OK, I'd never buy clothes online ( I mean, really??!) but I love music. From what I've seen, CDNOW is the best online music store out there: lots of information about most of their artists, biographies or histories of the band, etc. :)
You wanna see crap music sites? go to HMV orSam The Record Man (hey what can I say, i gotta give props to Canadian content
HMV requires JavaScript for any of their links to work (goodbye fast loading times) Not a lot of info on some artists, though anything new has some info on it. Sam's search leaves a lot to be desired, and they don't have covers or track listings for a lot of their back catalogue.
I find CDNOW to be immensely valuable for research, even if I haven't bought anything from them yet.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
That site was a complete usability nightmare. I tried ordering 3 times from there and gave up in complete frustration with their navigation and my browser crashing. With the money that was poured into that company, they could have hired Jakob "Mr Usability" Nielsen himself to consult on the project. They chose to go all flashy (pun intended) instead. The BBC article quotes them as saying it was "too advanced". Yeah, right.
I spent about 5 min mucking around their site. Not only was the navigation incomprehensible, the Flash downloads were butt slow, on a T-1. I have seen cheap low tech ecommerce sites do well, because they were easy to navigate and had the products and prices up front.
love is just extroverted narcissism
My clients and even my boss routinely point me to other sites they've seen that do something 'cool', and I'm starting to sound like a real bitch telling them 'No' all the time. /. for the icons?
When will these companies figure out that CONTENT is what drives people to a site, not fancy toys? Do we come to
As long as there are people who have limited bandwidth and processor power, the bleeding edge gizmos should probably be left to entertainment sites.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
I would buy a gimmick t-shirt online. I would buy a pair of Nike/Reebok shoes online too - after all, I probably know the shoes already, and they're just cheaper online. But I'm not going to buy a brand of clothes, which is not particularly cheap online. I don't know if they will fit, or if the colour is the same as on-screen. The material could be horrible. You just don't know.
Unless you know exactly what you are getting, you are unlikely to buy it online, and with clothes you're never going to know exactly what they are like until you pick them up.
I never shopped at Boo.com (or any other similar e-shop) because... why would I? I'll never buy clothes from online as long as I'm physically able to walk into a shop / boutique spending my time trying everything out till I'm satistfied and walk out as a one happy customer. Shopping online: forget it - banking online: YES PLEASE!
I selected "Spain" because I'm fluent in Spanish and I got the English site.
The dot-com e-com site I worked for last Christmas (ToyTime.com) just went quietly tats-up on Monday, putting ~100 people out of work (I had quit a couple of months before). I could rant about why the company was doomed to failure, but the short version boils down to company culture. The management was 100% oriented toward the IPO (which of course never happened) and threw together a shoddy ripoff of another, established e-com site in order to give the appearance of a functioning company.
As a result, my #1 biggest criteria for jobs going forward is company culture. If the management is a raft of flaming assfaces, like at the now-dead ToyTime.com, then forget it.
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
The real reason Boo.com failed is this:
Right now, Boo.com is the worst user experience on the planet.
Flash-based, it forces far too many long downloads, slow page redraws and a pathetic user experience that provides layers upon layers of interactivity to even reach a product. On a dial-up connection it is completely unusuable; on a fat pipe, it's barely so. The addition of unbelievable amounts of javascript and frames mean that even the fastest computer will see speed hits on other simultaneous functions.
Finally, the products are completely lack-luster. I can buy similar (or the same) items at faster sites any day of the week, usually for less money.
In web-design circles and advertising agencies here in New York City, Boo.com is a running gag, the place you say people worked when they're horrible at their job.
Boo.com deserves to fail.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
IIRC, the original boo.com site was overblown with too many images, JavaScript, probably Flash and lots of other junk. Nobody could use the site and within a few weeks they had to redo it as something simpler.
Now the company has gone bankrupt. Could this be related to customers being driven away by their early, over-flashy Website?
The tale of boo.com might be a useful weapon when trying to persuade your customers that JavaScript rollovers, MIDI files and Flash are not the last word in sophisticated Web design.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
This is proof, that despite all their posturing, Europeans can't find their financial ass with both hands.
You want to make money in the EU, import some dentists!
Unbelievably, Boo managed to piss £80m up the wall. Despite having this massive arsenal, they seroiusly f**ked up the technology side, with a site most people couldn't use, and it sucked for those that did.
It just goes to show the poor light that a lot of ecommerce entreprenures see technology in. They are quite happy to waste tens of millions on stupid marketing campaigns, but cannot be bothered to invest time and money to make sure their web sites work!
Whats the betting that their technology people told them that their 'high tech' web site ideas wouldn't work in practice, and where roundly ingnored by the management who wouldn't know one end of a computer from the another.
Still, this is the END of the bubble for companies like this. No one is getting that kind of money unless they seriously know what they are doing, including the technology aspect
I visited boo.com for the first time about a week ago when I heard it was a cool site. Cool it might have been, but useable it certainly was not. The trend in most e-commerce these days seems to be all style over substance, but when you look at the actually profitable sites such as e-bay and yahoo, they are anything but flashy. I surfed boo for about 45 minutes, suffering through their huge page download times and squinting at their tiny, somewhat washed out product pictures, before giving up completely. The site had plenty of style with all sorts of popup windows and jazzed up graphics, but I found it completely unusable. It is no surprise to me that it went out of business. Companies need to realize that the most powerful benefit of the internet is the ability to bring information and products directly to people's homes in a convienent manner. If you want to sell me shoes, sell me shoes. If you want to create a whole corporate image inside my head, buy a tv add because I might not flip the channel on my TV but I certainly won't wait 2 minutes for a bunch of useless graphics to download.
I'd just like to point out that, though I did indeed pose that question, I didn't mean it as "Is this the end for ecommerce" or anything so dramatic - I meant "Are people finaly realising that a company has to make a profit to succeed?"
--
--
...or am I missing something?
"The failure of such a high-profile internet start-up could undermine investor confidence in the whole business-to-consumer online retail sector."
It may undermine some investor confidence in some business-to-consumer online retail sector, not all investor confidence in all business-to-consumer online retail sector. Saying that noone will ever invest into B2C businesses is simply not seeing that there are some very successful businesses out there. How many of you bought computer related products off the web lately? I bought lots of hardware from online retailers. Of-course there will be failures but there also will be successes. Investors are responsible for doing their due dilligence process correctly, it is their responsibility and in many cases they simply failed to do this. Plus, the sector is very new and there are many unknowns. Anyway, companies that have some steady income are in a better situation than companies that have steady losses.
You can't handle the truth.
I would hope that Boo does not drag other e-commerce sites down with it. The collapse of Boo does not prove that e-commerce doesn't work. It proves that overly fancy design doesn't work.
This is truly an embarrasing moment for any swede when these three clowns mess up... again. On behalf of any other swedish e-commerce project - my apologies. :-)
-- http://z80.org - all opinions, all the time --
Because if they did, it was a bad move - their TV ads were _really_ lame (bad enough for me to turn down an interview with them - damn good job I did ;-)
All this talk of the bottom falling out of the e-commerce market is so much hot air - the stocks were overvalued by naive investors, and a few companies were bound to suffer when they settled to a more sensible level; e-commerce is a high-risk venture, and boo.com (and also lastminute.com) weren't anything special or solid enough to weather it.
Though I may not have had that much contact with boo.com, I can say from my limited dealings with lastminute.com that they are fairly clueless, and you've got to be at least two steps ahead of your competitors in this game....
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
The Register, that bastion of technology journalism, has good article on why Boo failed.
<summary>
It was all Boo's fault for experimenting after they started their high-profile ad campaigns, not before.
</summary>
--
E_NOSIG
Three things to buy on the net (examples):
Computers,
software,
Tinned peaches
Why? You know what they contain from the 'label'
Things not to buy on the net (examples):
Cars (Virtual testdrive? No thanks)
Clothes (Virtual changing rooms - How?)
Fresh peaches (How do you squeeze them to see if they are fresh?)
I think the business plan really sucked - You gotta see if it makes your bum look big before shelling out, right? People seem to think they offer something on the web and people will queue up to buy - with some goods, they are right, just from the convenience angle if nothing else.
But selling goods that most people will want to touch or try on before buying, on the web, is commercial suicide.
Someone discovered that it's not really a web site. It's a giant chicken! A giant chicken I tell you!!!!
:-)
(karma begone
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
In WA we had some good banks with good rates. In NH the banking absolutely sucks. They have no clue about customer service, every account at every bank (with the exception of the one account I was able to find) has a minimum balance of $750-$1000, rates for CDs are in the mid-4's.
--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
And you can be sure he'll rub in our proverbial faces. Make sure to keep your eye on the ether. Thanks Bob for being such a closed-minded **** Oh wait, thanks for ethernet. And for all you Micro$erfs living in a Linux world, check out Nicholas Petreley's current article on Infoworld. He suggests things that you should have learned the first time around, gasp!! when Novell was everyone's baby.
Firstly, as for those who would say that their site is 'over-flashy' I disagree. Its easy to find what you want from the catagory lists on the main page: once provided with a list of matches you can simple look along the list until you see something nice. Upon clicking it you can get in detail looks at the product and even dress up a web-manakin in a cool outfit. Then, add it to your 'boobag' and sorted. Of all the online clothes buying sites i find boo to be one of the most intuitive to navigate. However, it is true that until recommended by a friend I dont think id ever heard about boo.com, dispite being an avid online shopper. Now, that isnt a problem, they just got some of the best advertisment they could possible hope for, they got Slashdotted! . And any other online news site will have details of this: Id love to see some stats on their web server from about the time this was posted on beutiful /.
Having phoned their 0845 number, and asked for details i was told to 'check on the website on monday, for an announcement'.
Ahh well, any other suggestions for classy online gear in the UK?
--
"The Producers" (the movie that put Mel Brooks on the map, and one of the funniest movies ever made) was about a couple of Broadway producers who came up with a sure-fire get rich quick scheme. They sold part shares in a future production that totalled far more than 100%. Then they produced a play that was guaranteed to fail miserably. They pocket the loot, and nobody's the wiser.
....
So Boo.com gets umpty gazillion pounds for a Web-based business. Then they combine a questionable business model with a totally unusable Web site. Now they're bankrupt. "So sorry, money all gone. Goodbye".
If I had invested in these turkeys, I would want a *really good* look at the books. I'll lay odds that the executives (especially the CEO) aren't going to be sleeping on steam grates
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
I should worry as well, because I make my living off of webhosting & webdesign - companies come to me for their website and I help them. I hope everyone succeeds in their endeavor, but I also know that not all can.
I guess the rule is "Everything in Moderation"
Adam
Click Here for WebHosting
Have fun.
I have nothing else to say about just another hype market failure.
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
Judging by the stock market, that happened about a month ago. It's not that investors don't think e-commerce is going to be all that and a bag of chips, it's just that it's not clear whether or not consumers will be the only real beneficiary.
-cwk.
So in other words, It the "advanced" term really meand poorly designed. Right
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
My monitor is off for repairs and I'm using a loaner, one that runs mostly at 640x480. and there stupid popup window won't even fit on my page.
Oh well, there adds were cool, but, the name... 'boo.com'??
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
St00p3d m3.
In NNTP we have this great option to withdraw.
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
The reason this has such lasting ramifications is because very few of these sites make a profit. As a result they rely on venture capital to keep going. A major player such as boo (their brand recognition in Europe was excellent) collasping is bound to scare of investors.
This could hurt alot of startups. Somehow boo went through $135m in one year. For more details check out ft.com they have a very good article on it.
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
Maybe this is a sign of a more general trend. But the web design on boo.com was so awful that they probably weren't even in the running to begin with. They violated most rules of good web design: they had high bandwidth requirements, popped up a fixed size window, and left useless windows stranded.
I checked it out when they were new and saw failure coming fast
Who buys clothes by mailorder? Not their target group anyway.
If you want to sell something online it has to be either more convenient, cheaper or well stocked than the meat space alternative.
Boo was not cheaper, did not offer more choise and was not more convenient than your usual store. "Cool" webdesign might attract visitors, but they will not *buy* anything.
All opinions are my own - until criticized