Thread Intelligence Article

November 13, 2003
By Dirk Knemeyer

eCommerce has come a long way in the last seven years. Particularly for leaders in the specific space of eCommerce, the evolution from startup, to an unprofitable good idea, to a profitable good idea has taken some time. But companies like Amazon.com have successfully broken through, establishing themselves as a viable, long-term business and playing an instrumental role in cementing the role of eCommerce in the general culture.

But there is still a long way to go. One of the biggest impediments to the continued mainstreaming of eCommerce - to the point of reaching some level of relative ubiquity - is the uneven lack of execution. For every Amazon.com that gets things right (I've never had a problem in making more than 100 total purchases through Amazon), there are various other companies that struggle to provide a successful solution. More than having a negative impact on the brands of offending companies, poorly implemented eCommerce actually serves to impair the industry as a whole, reducing trust in the technology and medium. A recent example in my own experience serves to illustrate this point.

French Connection - Fashion: yes. Fulfillment and customer service: no
I have a few guilty pleasures, and one of them is clothing from French Connection. Expensively priced and designed for a younger, more style-conscious demographic than myself, I nonetheless enjoy buying their hip T-shirts. And like many large clothing companies, they have an eCommerce engine to sell products online.

I recently ordered two T-shirts from their website: I was properly billed and the merchandise was sent. So far, so good. A week later, I was billed a second time for one of the shirts and another (third) shirt was sent. While this mistake was certainly excusable, the next step certainly was not. Calling their contact numbers resulted in being re-directed to answering machines. While I dutifully left messages and tried to get the situation resolved, I did not receive callbacks. Only after numerous calls over a period of days did I finally speak with someone who could help. They instructed me to pay to have the package shipped back, later to be credited for the cost of return postage.

One week later, as if on cue, I was billed for yet another shirt that I did not order, which arrived shortly thereafter. And still today the dance continues.

A broken promise: messenger or medium?
I am certainly frustrated with French Connection for these breakdowns. Their seemingly poor implementation of the eCommerce fulfillment process, not to mention poor customer service to address the issues once they became evident, is a problem. Since those factors are relatively low on the priority list for why I choose French Connection, it ultimately will not do much to impact my perception of the brand. Even though I might think twice about buying from French Connection on the web, it will not influence whether or not I buy their clothing in the future.

However, the effect this failure had on my perception of eCommerce is far greater. This is a reminder that, just because a company is large and makes product available for purchase over the Internet, I shouldn't necessarily make the purchase. Particularly with brick-and-mortar companies that use eCommerce as an alternate or additional sales channel instead of their primary channel, there are a lot of places along the way that could break down and make online purchasing frustrating instead of easy. French Connection alone struggled with both successful order fulfillment and subsequent customer service. Even failing in one of the two would make online purchasing a shaky proposition. Failing in both took it well past my personal point of diminishing returns. Just imagine the amplified impact this would have on a first-time or relatively new user of eCommerce who did not have other positive experiences to offset this bad experience.

Companies like Amazon.com that are mature and based around an eCommerce model generally deliver as expected. And certainly some brick-and-mortar companies also provide very effective eCommerce models that are worth considering. But there is a galaxy of companies out there that offer their products and services via eCommerce but are not structured to successfully deliver on their promise. The problem is that each of those failures shakes the confidence of consumers in the technology in general. Not only are we less apt to buy from that company over the Internet, we are forced to think twice about buying from other companies. I am very confident with Amazon.com; French Connection has done nothing to change that. But what if I wanted to buy clothes from a relative peer to French Connection? Last month I would have. Today? I'm not sure. My expectations for successful eCommerce have decreased, and my willingness to try buying from someone new has also diminished. The failure of French Connection has had a resonant effect on how I view eCommerce in general.

As with a company's brand, it comes back to being a matter of trust. If people trust the technology and the medium, they will share their experiences with others, proving a successful source of viral marketing while themselves purchasing more and changing behavior through increased confidence. Yet unlike a company's brand, since this is a relatively new technology that many people are uncertain of, a failure by one company can prove to be a failure for many others. French Connection is not the only company that will suffer for their failure. My expectation level for the technology has changed. My trust is diminished. I will only be really comfortable ordering from the most credible and (seemingly) technology literate and savvy organizations.

And so the evolution of eCommerce continues. In order to gain mainstream momentum, the technology will need to keep improving - not so much from a technical perspective, but from an organizational implementation and support perspective. Only then will a relationship of trust be created that makes eCommerce more of a ubiquitous part of our everyday behavior instead of a tool used to varying degree by a relatively small percentage of our society. For those of us in the industry, we are in the position to be catalysts that help lead and implement successful eCommerce solutions that are properly integrated and executed.

Author - Dirk Knemeyer

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