An example of an E-commerce failure and its causes

The example of the E-commerce failure is boo.com. The boo.com website was widely criticized as poorly designed for its target online customer, going against many User-friendly conventions. The site relied heavily on javascript and Flash technology to display 3D views of wares as well as Miss Boo, a sales-assistant-style avatar. The first publicly released version of the site was fairly hefty—the home page alone was several hundred kilobytes which meant that the vast majority of users had to wait minutes to load the web page because that that time the broadband technologies were still not widely available. The site's front page did contained the warning; "this site is designed for 56K modems and above" only can view it.

The complicated design required the site to be displayed in a fixed size window, which limited the space available to display product information to the customer. Navigation techniques changed as the customer moved around the site, which appealed to those who are visiting to view the website and causes customer frustration who simply wanted to do online shopping. The company also had decided to pay postage on returns, but even more importantly its interface was also very complex with a hierarchical system that requires the user to answer four or five different questions before revealing that the product is out of stocks in a particular sub-section. The same basic questions will have to be answered by the customer again and again until the results had been found.

-Alvin Poon Chee Hau- :P