Boo.com: Poster Child for
Dot.com Failure?
Presented By:
Richard Nagel
Introduction
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New business for online shoppers
Offered high-quality designer sportswear
Offered brand names such as:
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North Face
Adidas
Fila
Cosmic Girl
How Boo.com worked
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Enabled online-shoppers to view products in
full-color and three dimensional
Zoom Feature
Rotate items 360 degrees
Advanced search engine allowed to search
by color, brand, price, and style
Miss Boo – animated figure for questions
Loyalty points
How Boo.com worked
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Free delivery within one week
Free returns
Fluent in seven languages
Local currencies were accepted from 18
countries
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These countries national taxes were calculated
and collected
Issues
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Launch date kept changing
Spent 25 million in advertising alone
Only 40% of customers could access site
Site design was slow and difficult to use
1 in 4 attempts to make purchase worked
Site not compatible with Macintosh
Spent over 200 million to launch the site
Short Life Span
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Boo.com was live for about 6 months
Site too complex for users
Losing money and had to discount clothing
40 percent
Poor planning and control
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Budgeting, planning, execution
Bought out by Fashionmall.com
Recommendations
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Start with smaller region
Established a firm budget
Test the software
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Prevented slow times
Access issues
Researched what the users had
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Type on internet service
What their expectations were