Target.com took its final flight from Amazon‘s nest in August after putting two years into developing an in-house retail site. It might have been a premature departure. Since then, two major crashes, serious usability glitches, and horrific service response to customer complaints around these issues have kept Target in the news. Following the most recent outage, the company lost its president, the second major executive to depart this month. Ad Age investigated the friction between the marketing and tech departments that contributed to this sloppy end product and reported on ongoing consumer frustrations with the site. They also noted that “Buzz scores for Target among 18-to-34-year-old women declined precipitously in the days after the new site’s launch.”
Read more at adage.com.
Amid discussion of the many shortcomings of Target’s new site and the process by which they launched it, not much attention has been given yet to the site’s content. Their product pages are inconsistent at best–written content is messy and limited, image thumbnails lead to different images, images are simply not sufficient, and pages are riddled with typos. Customer information pages and pop-ups are a mess, too. They employed over 20 vendors to help build the new site; did they bother to employ half that many editors or proofreaders?
But not all the press is negative. Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru suggested that this rocky beginning is not as unusual and foreboding as one might think. Other analysts point to why Target’s in-house move was the right choice. Between two major site outages, customer service failings, and the declining quality of Target’s content, will the retailer be able to right their online ship?
Read more at minnesota.publicradio.org.
