Target’s Too-Clever Site Fails (Or Does It?): Inside Missoni Tuesday
Written by Frank HayesSeptember 15th, 2011
Target's E-Commerce inventiveness is coming back to bite it. When the chain's three-week-old Web site crashed early Tuesday morning (Sept. 13) in the face of a ravening hoard of shoppers looking for Missoni products, the site truly was down. By noon Eastern time, the site was back up—but many would-be customers continued to think the site was offline throughout the rest of the day. Those who did reach the site to shop reported issues at checkout time that might (or might not) have been true IT glitches. The problem: Even when Target.com works, it doesn't work the way customers expect.
That compounded the problems of "Missoni Tuesday," which a Target spokesman said saw "greater item demand than we do on a typical Black Friday." But the crush of customers, and the fact that so many items sold out, masked a serious issue: Even though Target.com made buckets of money that day, the result left a bad taste in the mouths of many Target customers—and the site's nonconformist challenges are still there.
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