I don’t even know where to start with this. Target launched a new site last week. I guess they’re pretty proud of it, but they’ve managed to completely fail in so many ways.
The Backstory
In 2001, Target elected to partner with Amazon in order to leverage Amazon’s e-commerce technology. This may have made sense at the time, but Target should have started to move toward being off of Amazon by the time the 5 year deal was done. Instead, it has been renewed a couple times and was extended through 2011. The last renewal was announced 2 years ago and Target knew at the time that they were going to move off of Amazon. That means they’ve had at least 2 years to get this right. That’s a LONG time.
The Good
Honestly, I haven’t found a lot that’s good about their new site. It’s possible that getting away from Amazon’s technology will benefit them in the long run and that would be a good thing.
The Bad
There is a lot wrong with this site. It’s definitely not ready for prime time and was either rushed out to meet a deadline or there is a big team of idiots behind it. Maybe both. A quick run through the site exposed a lot of basic items that are being handled poorly. I could probably spend days picking this piece of junk apart, but here are a few things you guys can learn from:
Don’t feature “out of stock” items at the beginning of a search result – It’s not difficult to filter these out or at least not show them first. It’s basic but if your customers show up to that page and see that half the products are out of stock, they’re going to move on.
Check for Validation – Maybe you don’t need to shoot for a perfectly valid site but it’s always a good idea to make sure you don’t have a ton of errors. Target.com’s homepage has 244 errors showing. Most of them are basic and missed out of laziness.
If a site: search doesn’t have your homepage in the first few results, there’s likely a problem. If the results are full of search results pages, you’re f*cked. – You can learn a lot from running a site: search on your own site. Look at the titles. Are they something you would click on? Now look at the descriptions. Are they unique and interesting? In Target’s case, the answer is “Hell no!”
Don’t use tabbed navigation just to be cute – I’m not sure what they were thinking here, but on their TV pages (and likely others), they have tabbed navigation about half way down the page. One option is “item details” and the other is “item specifications.” The “item specifications” tab doesn’t offer anything unique.
If you’re selling something, don’t throw AdSense ads all over your site – There’s no logical reason to let your competition show ads on your site. If it’s making enough money to warrant putting them in the page, you’re failing at conversion.
Don’t forget to replace characters with HTML entities where necessary. – This is a good way to break something. For example, Target is outputting quotes to meta tags and breaking the code rather than using the proper entity (click on the image to see the suckiness in all its glory).
I could nitpick the hell out this site. Viewing the source nearly makes me sick. There is javascript in places it doesn’t belong, random css scattered everywhere, and as I noted above, all kinds of validation issues.
The Fugly
Sometimes people do things that warrant a good beat down or at least being fired over. I’m normally not a fan of calling for peoples’ jobs but when a project that appears to have been ongoing for 2+ years shits itself like this, someone’s gotta go.
I have heard reports of long outages since the rollout. Last night it was offline for at least 5 hours that I was monitoring it. That’s not good. That’s a miserable, amateur, fail. These days, unless something is completely unexpected, a site should NEVER be unavailable. Even if you’re doing maintenance, there are very few excuses to have a site go offline.
Now that the site actually loads and I was able to check it out, I ended up poking around for a bit. One of the pages was left open in a tab that was long forgotten and minimized. Well…guess what? That little tab came back and started haunting me. After being hidden for a few minutes, I got the following message and the tab brought itself to the front of everything on my screen.
I decided to close that and see what happened if I left that tab in the background. A minute later, I got this one.
Come on Target. I’m not logged in. This is amateur crap. You don’t pop messages up like this. You’ve guaranteed that I won’t be back. Do you guys honestly think this is smart? Let a session die silently. Even if you think this is a reasonable thing to do for people, don’t do it to guests.
How Could This Happen?
We may never know what has gone down behind the scenes at Target.com but there are quite a few pieces of evidence to base some theories on.
Too many cooks in the kitchen – According to the numbers in Target’s press release, they had far too many people involved in this:
More than 20 vendor technology partners were involved in the construction of the new Target.com.
Key contributors include:
SapientNitro: Lead partner and primary systems integrator
IBM: Multichannel eCommerce platform provider
Huge: Site creative – visual and interactive design
Infosys: Global inventory visibility and cross-channel order-management functionality
AT&T: Hosting provider
Laziness or a lack of quality control – A lot of issues I’m seeing on Target.com are basic. They are things that should be able to be cleaned up quickly and easily if they just put in a little bit of time.
Lack of knowledge sharing – Some of what I’m seeing here could likely be corrected if people just communicated internally and worked together to create a better site. I wouldn’t be surprised if the developers have never talked to an SEO over there. The whole thing reeks of red tape & corporate segregation. If that’s not the case, shame on the team that did this as it’s half assed and they might as well be stealing from Target.
Overall, there are a ton of lessons to be learned from this. I just can’t believe that they rolled this site out after having so much time to work on it. I don’t see how a company that lets this kind of mess happen can survive for more than a few more years. It’s no wonder they’re getting their butt kicked by Walmart.
BUFFALO, NY - From "Black Friday" to crazy camping deals, there sure is a lot to get to today.
Target has launched a so-called "Black Friday" sale today in July.
In my personal opinion, I really resent when stores call sales that don't occur on the day after Thanksgiving "Black Friday sales."
Black Friday sales are supposed to be store-wide, absolutely insane savings.
Today, there are a handful of great deals at Target, but nothing on par with what we'll see on Black Friday.
Check out the deals in the toys, home living, 20 percent off on a Kitchen-Aid Mixer (which is rare), the entertainment and a big gaming deal.
The TV deals are lame (in my opinion) as the Philips and Vizio are not considered the best TVs on the market and there will be much better deals October through November on higher-end models.
The deal on the Kodak EasyShare camera at 40 percent off is decent, but I will find better deals on some newer cameras from brands like Canon and much lower prices on a 14MP camera from Olympus in the coming months.
Now on to camping.
These deals today are all amazing, timely and perfect to enjoy the rest of your summer camping in our beautiful state.
Here's what I found (again, each link is embedded with a coupon so just click and save).
A big thanks as always to my savings confidant Roger for all the insider information.
Coleman four-person instant tent
• You saw our demo on air. Coleman claims it has an MSRP of $178, but we found it for almost half.
• $99.99 -- and it ships for free.
• Expires on 7/16
Overstock
Mt. Springer family camping tent
• $249.62 down to $160.38
• Expires 7/16
REI
Big Agnes Fairview 2 tent
• $200 down to $129.93
• Expires 7/19
Cabela's
Cabela's Deluxe XPG tent
• $219.99 down to $149.99
• $5 shipping when you spend more than $150 -- so buy another product for more than one cent and you'll have it shipped to your home for a great price.
• Expires 7/18
Cabela's WestWind Deluxe tent
• $219.99 down to $149.99
• Expires 7/18
MyGofer.com
Up to 70 percent off all camping equipment
• I almost didn't include this one as you can only see a few discounts shown on the page, but there are 2,292 camping products and I couldn't resist digging a little deeper. I had to sign in and create an account, but then I saw that products I placed in the checkout were getting the savings I was expecting.
• It's a little frustrating not to know what discount you'll be getting, but there are definitely savings to be made. As I say, the product range is amazing.
• Expires today