Chapter case: the Failure of Boo. com MBA 612- International Management Submitted to Charls Habis Submitted by Bijaya shrestha Date: April 7, 2009 Chapter case: the failure of Boo. com Question 1: was Boo. com doomed more by its faulty strategy or by its poor implementation? Boo. com was a European company founded in 1998 and operating out of a London head office, which was founded by three Swedish entrepreneurs. Boo. com is the first European global e-commerce entity. The company is launching in the US and Europe at the same time.
With offices in London, New York, Stockholm and Munich, they have a desire to permit each national site to be driven by their local developers. The issues Timing Boo. com launched several months of delays after dropping two launched dates and problems with the user experience when Boo. com first launched. Indeed sales had grown rapidly and were around $500,000 for the fortnight prior to the site being shut down. The fundamental problem was that the company was following an extremely aggressive growth plan, launching simultaneously in multiple European countries.
This plan was founded on the assumption of the ready availability of venture capital money to see the company through the first few years of trading until sales caught up with operating expenses. Such capital ceased to be available for all practical purposes in the second quarter of 2000 following dramatic falls in the “dot crash” following the Dot-com bubble. Boo would probably have failed for this reason even if the user experience had been excellent and the launch on schedule. Problems with the user experience The presentation of products and content on their site were both imaginative and offer an experience.
The Boo. com website was widely criticized as poorly designed for its target audience, going against many usability 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 for the site to load though it was assured by those at boo. com that they will keep to a limit of 8 seconds for a page to download.
Its interface was also complex with a hierarchical system that required the user to answer four or five different questions before revealing that there were no products in stock in a particular sub-section. Discussion Boo. com has been criticized for poor management quality. The firm had few management controls and many of the personnel were consultants with little relevant business experience. As well as Boo. com failed to create an immersive retailing experience online. The badly designed advertising campaign was another problem faced by Boo. om. They over spent on advertising early on which created a great deal of consumer interest, but then the web site lunch was delayed by about five months by the time consumer got fed up. Boo. com was a victim of internet time, e-commerce move faster in internet time where as e-tailing system takes much longer to develop. In the case of Boo. com web site was not fully designed when it was lunched and changes made later on reducing consumer confidence. Therefore, going through the case I found that Boo. com was doomed by its poor implementation.
