The new Target.com has crashed six times since it went live on Aug. 23, and accounted for more than half of the major outages this year at the top 100 sites in the U.S. by revenue, according to Web monitor AlertBot. Baird & Co. The chain, based in Minneapolis, decided to bring Target.com in-house to improve the experience, eliminate the commissions to Amazon and integrate it with Target’s more than 1,700 stores.
That meant it had to go outside its comfort zone by hiring developers and working with several partners to build a new site from scratch that generated more than $1 billion in annual sales. Target’s problems aren’t unique and point to larger obstacles within the industry to improving e-commerce, according to Sucharita Mulpuru, an Internet analyst at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc. "This isn’t a-list development talent."
Adding to the pressure on Target to make the transition to running its own site is that several of its largest rivals, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. have already gone online. Its shares have fallen 12 percent this year.
In the press release announcing the debut of the revamped site, Steve Eastman, president of Target.com, said the new platform would create a “more user-friendly, reliable experience.” So far, that has not happened.
The first major sign that Target.com was not ready came on Sept. 13, three weeks after its launch, when the release of a collection from Italian fashion house Missoni brought a rush of visitors to the site that rivaled the traffic on Black Friday and crashed it for most of the day.
A month later, on Oct. 13, the site went down again during peak shopping hours. Later that day, Target announced in a one-sentence statement that Eastman left the company to “pursue other opportunities.” Eastman joined Target in 1982, and was head of merchandising for consumer electronics when he moved to president of Target.com in June 2008. Target refused to comment on the departure and Eastman could not be reached.
Since Eastman’s departure, the site has crashed four more times, including once last week, and when it has been running shoppers have complained about problems with checkout and gift registries. Eastman’s position has not been filled and the site’s staff is reporting to Kathryn Tesija, executive vice president of merchandising, Morgan O’Murray, a Target spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. “We have a team dedicated to addressing concerns, and are working diligently to ensure that the site is operating efficiently for the holiday season,” O’Murray said.
Target is trying to improve its website as shoppers this holiday season plan to go online more than ever. Forrester estimates that while 90 percent of buying still takes place in stores, more than 40 percent is swayed by the Web.
The Web generates about 2 percent of Target’s almost $70 billion in annual sales, and many more purchases are influenced by browsing on Target.com, the company has said. The performance of its site won’t make or break the holiday season for Target because its stores matter more, and yet “if anybody’s Web site keeps crashing, it will be bad for the holidays,” it has been said.
In any case, Sebastian of Baird says that, in the long run, Target made the right move.
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