An example of an E-commerce failure and its causes

In this century, many people are try to set up a simple e-commerce website to sell and promote the products, some e-commerce website was very helpful to their business, but there are also many failure example in e-commerce. The largest European dot-com failure was Boo.com

Boo.com was a United Kingdom fashion store launched on year 1999 with the huge capital invested by few famous entrepreneurs. Because of this, boo.com had become a high profile e-commerce website and everyone was look forward to this website. The vision for Boo.com is to create a European brand and become the world larger global fashion e-retailer.

Bad news for Boo.com came on May 2000, Boo.com was closed on May 18th 2000. Why did Boo.com fail as an E-tailer on Fashion?

Failure to plan and poor financial control
The main reason that cause Boo.com fail is the investor fund cant meet the spiraling marketing, technology and wage bills. Boo.com was spend the huge amount of fund into the programming for multli-currency sales and product delivery, and the high maintenance expenses in creating the 3D photographs for the product everymonth. Boo.com also giving the excessive employment benefits and luxurious spending to attract "some of the brightest brains in Europe" suggest by Leander and Malmsten. Therefore, investors rufused to invest any more cash into this business because they are disagree with the suggestion.

Poor web design
Moreover, the web design for Boo.com are poor because the website system was limit the amount to make only three transactions in twenty minutes and in year 1999 to 2000 the internet bandwidth was not sufficient for the average internet user to view the 3D website. These kind of approach would not entice a customer to shop at this site again and also discourage the potential customer from shopping over this website.

Bad Marketing
Traditionally, customer are attracted to buy over interner by the lower price. Boo.com was fail to do that because Boo.com are selling the premium and quality fashion goods. The goods wan come with the high cost and the high maintenance expensive on the website have increased the clothes selling price.

reference: http://www.davechaffey.com/E-commerce-Internet-marketing-case-studies/Boo.com-case-study