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Boo No More

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the radley dept.

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?"

3 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. Boo was crap by hatless · · Score: 5

    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.

  2. My wife never heard of boo.com by Roblimo · · Score: 5

    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

  3. A cautionary tale of Web design by Ed+Avis · · Score: 5

    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