An example of an E-commerce failure and its causes

There are some successful e-commerce companies such as eBay, Google, and Yahoo. However, there have large numbers of e-commerce companies that are not able to maintain their profit through e-commerce. Boo.com is one of the companies which failure in doing the e-commerce business, Boo.com was a United Kingdom company founded by Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander and Patrik Hedelin, which later flopped after having to liquidate and was placed into receivership in 18 May 2000. Boo.com’s intention is to sell branded fashion apparel over the Internet. There have some reason of the failures; one of the problems was mismanagement, technology and limited space available to display product information to customer.

1) Trying to sell the wrong product online

There have some products that are not appropriate to be sold through online. For the products which are inexpensive and could be easily bought from the local store are not worth selling through using on the internet. Beside the inexpensive products, products such as clothes and shoes which need trying would be difficult to sell because it need people try the products from the local store too.

2) Poor customer service

Online service provides less interaction between the customer and seller. Customer just can find the information which have provide by the website they surf. The information may be limited to enable provide knowledge about the product to the customer, so it can confuse the customer about the product and this poor customer service would send the customers running away. So it need to provide excellent service to satisfy customer needs and wants.

3) A poorly designed website

Poor designed website has a major effect to bring the failure of the e-commerce. Overcrowding can bring the poor customer service, because it can make the customer confuse with the graphics was present. Professional website need to feature the items clearly with the photos and descriptions. Beside that, too much color, flash animation or graphics could slow down the downloading process which brings the poor customer service.

4) Lack of marketing

Marketing of the site is needed for both online and offline. Marketing is the process of interesting potential customers in products and services provided. So marketing is essential to let you know your competitive advantage and to show your customers with the best price that can be offer compare with the others competitors. Beside that, the company should do some surveys and collect information in order to fulfill the customer needs and wants.