New Target.com Forgot The Customers
Written by Frank HayesAugust 25th, 2011
When Target's development team launched the new Target.com on Tuesday (Aug. 23) after two years of development, it must have felt like a dream come true. But it wasn't—at least not for customers, who discovered that big chunks of the new site didn't work at all, and almost nothing worked as well as the site they'd seen a day or two before. A very dangerous telltale sign: One of the most common hashtags on Twitter posts about the new E-Commerce site was #FAIL.
Why? What went wrong? Actually, not much, from the point of view of experienced developers. Naturally the site had glitches—that's to be expected. And Target's plan of starting with a new site that had the same basic functionality as the old site, and only later rolling out exciting new features supported by what's baked into the new architecture, was a solid development approach. Unfortunately, although that plan worked very well for developers, it made no sense at all to customers—the people any E-Commerce site is supposed to be all about.
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Our Comment SPAM system is getting very aggressive these days and has been blocking legitimate comments. If you post a comment and don't see it appear within 2 hours or so, can you please send a heads-up to customer-service@storefrontbacktalk? Ideally, please include the time you posted the comment. That will allow us to try and hunt for it. Thanks! P.S. We're working on fixing the system, but we don't want to lose any valuable comments in the meantime.
We're at a nexus in the evolution of customer reward and incentives and the tools that are being used are based on 1980's batch processing technology. 
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