Why the Boo.comeback makes sense

There has been much dis­cus­sion lately, most of it neg­a­tive (you can read more com­ments on Tech­no­rati), about the come­back of boo.com and once again, I find myself on the oppo­site side of the shared wis­dom. Before I go into rea­sons as to why I think a come­back by Boo.com (a boo.comeback?) makes sense, let me first go into my unique qual­i­fi­ca­tions to make such an assess­ment: I hap­pen to have worked at Boo.com in the past and I was the insider who exposed some of the chal­lenges the com­pany had faced. I spent a fair amount of my time, in 2000 and 2001, talk­ing at con­fer­ences about the lessons learned from this fail­ure and I think that some of those are now fixed.

Look­ing Back

In the ensu­ing 6 years, I’ve been going over and over what went wrong and dis­cov­ered more lessons along the way: the mar­ket con­di­tions were wrong, we were young and arro­gant, and, for the most part, we didn’t really under­stand the mag­ni­tude of what we were try­ing to accom­plish: to remind peo­ple, our goal was to launch a web­site in 16 coun­tries (15 EU coun­tries + the US) on day one, local­iz­ing our site for each of them. At the time (1999), no one had accom­plished that broad a cov­er­age (nor had any­one even tried to).

So it seemed a lit­tle crazy but, then again, crazy peo­ple had built Netscape, Yahoo, Ebay, and Ama­zon in the pre­vi­ous few years. So crazy seemed not only pos­si­ble but it seemed to be the key to suc­cess on the Inter­net. The prob­lems we encoun­tered fell in a num­ber of areas: cur­rency exchanges, tax issues, lan­guage local­iza­tion, inte­gra­tion with many ful­fill­ment part­ners and a front-end expe­ri­ence that called for broad­band con­nec­tions. We basi­cally wanted to build eCom­merce 2.0 long before there was a web 2.0.

Look­ing Forward

So fast-forward to now. Broad­band uptake is near­ing 50% in many of the tar­get coun­tries and the num­ber of users has grown tremen­dously, gov­ern­ments have learned about inter­net ecom­merce and now have spe­cific rules relat­ing to it. And inte­gra­tion across many sys­tem is what web ser­vices and mash-ups are all about. Do I smell progress? So let’s revisit my old post (which later was pub­lished in Busi­ness 2.0) points and look at them through the 2006 lens.

The Cur­rency Problem

Back then, the 16 coun­tries we tar­geted meant 16 dif­fer­ent currencies.

Today, with the rise of the Euro as a uni­fy­ing cur­rency, the same 16 coun­tries only have 4 dif­fer­ent cur­ren­cies (the UK still being stuck on the pound ster­ling and Den­mark keep­ing its cur­rency a national one pegged to the Euro. The US and the Euro are the other two cur­ren­cies cov­ered.) This greatly reduces the com­plex­ity of pric­ing mod­els across Europe and makes the over­all cost of man­ag­ing the cat­a­log much lower.

Back then, we actu­ally had to build our own cur­rency tracker, with peo­ple input­ing the exchange rates daily into the sys­tem to keep every­thing aligned.

Today, you can get access to cur­rency exchanges via web ser­vices (just off the top of my head, I can think of Reuters and CBS Mar­ket­watch pro­vid­ing this type of data), there­fore automat­ing what was once a man­ual task and, once again, reduc­ing admin­is­tra­tion costs for the catalog.

Tax Issues

Back then, there was no con­sis­tency in the way taxes were assessed on goods sold online. The finan­cial peo­ple at Boo.com ver­sion 1 spent a lot of time with a big 5 accoun­tant group and a lot of local gov­ern­ment to lobby for nor­mal­iza­tion of rules around taxes on cross-border business.

Today, because all of those gov­ern­ments under­stand the value of inter­net com­merce and because many have worked in con­junc­tions with each other (through the G8 and the EU) to nor­mal­ize rules sur­round­ing tax­a­tion of goods sold on the Inter­net the prob­lem is eas­ier to solve.

Back then, we had to build our own sys­tems to track all the vagaries of the dif­fer­ent tax sys­tems. It wasn’t a build vs. buy deci­sion because there were no pack­ages offered on the mar­ket to deal with this.

Today, you can buy soft­ware pack­ages that has all the tax­a­tion rules built in so that prob­lem is no longer one you need to build for. You can just buy the tech­nol­ogy and let the ven­dor worry about the changes in tax­a­tion laws.

Lan­guage Localization

When we set out to build Boo.com, a strong com­po­nent was the idea of offer­ing the online store in the local lan­guage of the user. Boo.com was actu­ally the first store to offer as high a level of cus­tomiza­tion by mar­ket and we had to make a num­ber of changes to the e-commerce soft­ware pack­age to make it into a glob­al­ized plat­form. Remem­ber that, at the time, e-commerce was pri­mar­ily the domain of US and UK com­pa­nies so sell­ing in a lan­guage other than Eng­lish was rare. E-commerce sites which sold goods in non-English mar­kets were gen­er­ally cus­tomized on a one off basis but no one, prior to Boo.com, had attempted to have a sin­gle back-end sys­tem run mul­ti­ple countries.

Today, more ven­dors are sell­ing solu­tions which can be cus­tomized across a vari­ety of west­ern lan­guages. The solu­tions are not yet per­fect but, for the most part, they work (there are still a num­ber of issues when it comes to local­iza­tion across 2-byte lan­guages, espe­cially when it comes to site with mixed lan­guages.) Back then, we also had to develop a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem that could han­dle trans­la­tion work­flows and man­age­ment of con­tent in mul­ti­ple lan­guages. It wasn’t pretty but it worked and it required a lot of inter­nal trans­la­tion to hap­pen. Each prod­uct had descrip­tion, sizes, etc… avail­able in mul­ti­ple lan­guages. That part was actu­ally a fairly large man­age­ment of con­tent night­mare. Today, mod­ern con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem can han­dle more com­plex work­flows (allow­ing to track when trans­la­tions are com­pleted) and even can pro­vide hooks to farm-out trans­la­tion of the con­tent to exter­nal par­ties. This sub­stan­tially reduces the cost of a multi-country offering.

Inte­gra­tion with ful­fill­ment partners

Back then, a fair num­ber of peo­ple at Boo.com were experts in EDI (or elec­tronic data infra­struc­ture) because EDI bridges were the only way to inte­grate into our ful­fill­ment part­ners. Web ser­vices didn’t exist so we had batch jobs trig­ger­ing every hour to the ware­houses at DeutcheP­ost and UPS so they could pick, pack and ship the orders. This was expen­sive and prob­a­bly the area where we lost the most money on a sin­gle transaction.

Today, ser­vices like ful­fill­ment by Ama­zon pro­vide the same ser­vice at a sub­stan­tially lower cost and with less inte­gra­tion headaches as web ser­vices are mak­ing it easy to inte­grate their ser­vices into an e-commerce oper­a­tion. That sav­ing alone could jus­tify the exis­tence of Boo.com 2.0 (actu­ally, it would be 3.0 as Fash­ion­Mall tried to res­ur­rect Boo.com once already).

Front-end

No dis­cus­sion of Boo.com can be full unless we talk about its front-end.

The Broad­band Pen­e­tra­tion Problem 

Many peo­ple laughed at the attempt we made at cre­at­ing a more user friendly inter­face to e-commerce. Back then, a more inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence meant using Flash. It was the only way to get a lot of parts mov­ing together. Things like Zoom-In/Zoom-out or Rotate type of effects were hard to accom­plish with DHTML and much eas­ier to do so with Flash. Since XML didn’t exist, we didn’t have AJAX. Since we didn’t have AJAX, we went with Flash. Since we went with Flash, the assets were large. Since the assets were large and the aver­age user was con­nect­ing via a 56k modem, the site looked slow.

The idea was that every click should feel snappy, a model now com­mon with AJAX-based appli­ca­tions but we failed in one assump­tion, which is that broad­band pen­e­tra­tion would move at a faster rate. Our expec­ta­tion were that 1Megabit lines (much slower than what one now gets via cable or DSL) would be read­ily avail­able within a year. That was a very flawed assump­tion and we had not planned any con­tin­gency for any slower a deployment.

Sell­ing clothes requires details

Another inter­est­ing chal­lenge was that we were try­ing to sell clothes online. Eval­u­at­ing a DVD, CD, or book online is easy. How­ever, cloth­ing is dif­fer­ent: when peo­ple shop for clothes, they like to feel the fab­ric, look at the details in the fab­ric. That expe­ri­ence was hard to repro­duce online. Back then, what we set out to do, in order to help mimic some of the expe­ri­ence was to have highly detailed pic­tures of the goods. 

Every prod­uct was shot mul­ti­ple times at a stun­ning 5 megapix­els per pic­ture (the high­est pos­si­ble res­o­lu­tion at the time). This meant pic­ture files that were about 1–2 Mb per file, some­thing that seems small in the era of Flickr and YouTube but was mas­sive in the era of 56k modems. The advan­tage of such detailed pic­tures was that you could zoom in to a level higher than what you could do in a store (part of our attempt to com­pen­sate for the fact that you couldn’t touch the mer­chan­dise). Today, such level of detail is stan­dard among most of the online cloth­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers and with more broad­band lines, it’s no big deal.

Another inno­va­tion we intro­duced was the pre­sen­ta­tion of prod­ucts in 3D. You could basi­cally rotate every prod­uct in our inven­tory any way you wanted. This, at a time when Quick­TimeVR was not on the mar­ket­place. This meant get­ting our pho­tog­ra­phy part­ners to come up with com­pletely new approaches to tak­ing prod­uct shots, some­times requir­ing as many as 15–20 shots per prod­uct in order to get every­thing right. Those pic­tures were then taken into Flash and adjusted so that you could rotate the prod­uct and zoom in and out of it, a feat that now seems pretty stan­dard, using QuickTimeVR.

All that pho­tog­ra­phy work didn’t come cheap, espe­cially when you con­sider that this was done across 5,000 prod­ucts and that all the assets were then stored on our servers (Hard Drive space was nowhere near as cheap as it is now). 

Mod­el­ing

Another inno­va­tion was the intro­duc­tion of vir­tual mod­els you could use to try the clothes on. Today, Sears offers a lower qual­ity ver­sion of what we were offer­ing back then (their model still requires a reload of the full page to turn it.) Because all the prod­ucts had 3D equiv­a­lent, mod­el­ing them was rel­a­tively easy and we decided to throw it in as an extra fea­ture that helped enhance the user expe­ri­ence. Once again, because of the pro­cess­ing and band­width required to make that hap­pen, the idea was ahead of its time. 

Miss Boo

So we now all know that chatty avatars on web sites are not a good idea. The con­cept behind Miss Boo was to help make the expe­ri­ence sim­i­lar to that of a store, with a sales assis­tant (Miss Boo), help­ing you out. Our long term goal was to have Miss Boo attached on the back-end to a real per­son so we could have inte­grated IM while you were shop­ping (that plan never came to fruition as the com­pany had other con­cerns after launch). In the process, though, we’ve learned that avatars are gen­er­ally despised and prob­a­bly helped many sites avoid them.

Tag­ging

Because we wanted the expe­ri­ence to be a more com­mu­nal one, we had a way for users to tag cloth­ing (well, we didn’t call them tags, we called them “LaBOOls” (labels, with a Boo in the mid­dle, get it?) in the great tra­di­tion of badly named things on our site). How­ever, because there was no AJAX or other way to quickly get the data back and forth, it required a reload of the whole page after each tag was applied. The fea­ture was quickly killed in order to gain speed but I can’t think of any other site that had tag­ging on prod­ucts at the time (if I’m wrong, please rec­tify me in the comments).

Chatty Tone

The BooZine (Boo Mag­a­zine) was our attempt to cre­ate a more friendly, open tone when deal­ing with users. We didn’t want to be just a store, we wanted to engage the users. When our forums (remem­ber, this is before blogs were pop­u­lar) started fill­ing up with vit­ri­olic com­ments, we were forced to shut them down, clos­ing a chan­nel of com­mu­ni­ca­tion for users to us. It was a real shame but I think our attempt can be mir­rored in the way most web 2.0 com­pa­nies now have a blog that they use to receive feed­back from users.

A more mature market

Back then, few peo­ple were buy­ing stuff online. Even fewer were buy­ing clothes online and an even smaller num­ber than that was buy­ing hip cloth­ing. Con­sid­er­ing all the chal­lenges Boo.com was try­ing to address, its tar­get mar­ket was just too small to make it a suc­cess­ful business.

Today, blogs like Cool­Hunt­ing, Hype­Beast or MocoLoco show that there is a mar­ket for the types of goods Boo was try­ing to sell. That, in itself, could be a good rea­son for Boo.com to come back: The mar­ket they were address­ing is finally there. How­ever, it may also be a rea­son for it to not come­back: the mar­ket they were address­ing now has com­peti­tors in it.

Was Boo.com the first Web 2.0 company?

I have to admit that I’ve been feel­ing a cer­tain level of uneasi­ness about Web 2.0: to me, there didn’t seem to be much there that I had not seen before: web ser­vices (yup, done since 2000), user gen­er­ated con­tent (tried it in a lim­ited fash­ion with with the “labools” and forums), more trans­parency (tried that with forums in the past), chatty tone (attempted at Boo). What I failed to real­ize is that where we failed was in the way we imple­mented things. But look­ing back now, the rea­son it didn’t feel new was that much of that exper­i­men­ta­tion was on our site only, not part of a more wide­spread phenomenon.

Another thing that got me think­ing along the way of Boo.com as a Web 2.0 com­pany was the excel­lent post on Pixel Acres about the visual design of web 2.0. Let me explain, pick­ing points from the article:

Inte­gral to Web 2.0 is har­ness­ing the input of web­site vis­i­tors. Users can gen­er­ate con­tent for a web ser­vice, pro­mote it in a “viral” peer-to-peer fash­ion, and improve it’s data qual­ity through their opin­ions and preferences.

Users of Boo could cre­ate their model, share it with friends (fol­low­ing the UGC model, I guess). So the input com­po­nent was there, as was the shar­ing one.

Most Web 2.0 sites come across as friendly, approach­able and small-scale, using sub­tle design deci­sions to gain our trust.

Every deci­sion about the front end was to make it appear friendly, chatty and hide as much of the com­plex­ity as pos­si­ble (that’s why so many peo­ple thought what we were doing was easy but badly implemented).

Bright, cheer­ful col­ors dom­i­nate Web 2.0 sites… Bold pri­mary col­ors sug­gest a play­ful, fun atti­tude and also help to draw atten­tion to impor­tant page elements.

One word: orange. The boo.com site had cheer­ful col­ors all over the place (some­times so cheer­ful that I wor­ried it would be seen as a toy)

Rounded Every­thing: The friend­li­ness of rounded cor­ners is in keep­ing with the com­fort­able, infor­mal tone of many web 2.0 sites… In a great FontShop arti­cle analysing the logos of Web 2.0, it was clear that rounded type­faces are all the rage. This smooth approach to type lends a mod­ern play­ful­ness to a company’s visual identity.

Yup, Boo.com was round, very round, even the logo and the fonts. From a visual stand­point, it was much closer to today’s web 2.0 site than the ones it lived among.

Most Web 2.0 sites devote prime real estate to the mes­sage that they offer a free service.

Well, we kept push­ing our “Free” boozine (Boo Mag­a­zine) and looked at it as a way to hook peo­ple into com­ing back again and again to the site.

You won’t find any stock pho­tog­ra­phy of smil­ing sup­port staff on a Web 2.0 site — that’s a tac­tic favored by small com­pa­nies try­ing to mimic large cor­po­ra­tions. Sim­ple icons and screen­shots are the order of the day when it comes to imagery on Web 2.0 sites. 3D and beveled icons can lend ele­gance and pol­ish to a page design that is oth­er­wise fairly stark.

Boo.com was 100% stock pho­tog­ra­phy free. It was all icons and cartoons.

A good Web 2.0 app ought to be light­weight and easy for users to grasp, and clever visual design and copy­writ­ing can help remove bar­ri­ers to entry. Smart use of lay­out, color, type and copy can go a long way towards eas­ing the pain.

Well, we failed on the light­weight end of things but the design was to be as airy as possible.

As far as Web 2.0 is con­cerned, big­ger is def­i­nitely bet­ter. Big­ger text, that is. Large text is easy on the eye, and cou­pled with snappy copy­writ­ing makes infor­ma­tion easy to absorb. And now that acces­si­bil­ity is cool, it’s pos­si­ble to be a hot­shot web designer and use enor­mous type.

… and back then, peo­ple said we didn’t make good use of the real estate because the fonts on our screens were too big. How­ever, note that acces­si­bil­ity was inex­is­tant at Boo.com

The lay­out of Web 2.0 sites might be described as min­i­mal. With a focus on leg­i­bil­ity and ease of use, good use is made of white space. White space allows impor­tant infor­ma­tion to stand apart, pro­vides rest for the eye, and imparts a sense of calm and order. Gen­er­ous lead­ing also makes text copy eas­ier for the eye to fol­low. Some Web 2.0 lay­outs are so min­i­mal that they verge on bor­ing, but designed well, an unclut­tered page can be incred­i­bly tasteful.

Yes, we had a lot of whitespace.

Friendly, infor­mal copy­writ­ing allows a more per­sonal rela­tion­ship with web­site visitors.

Peo­ple com­plained that our con­tent was too infor­mal, actu­ally. I guess taste has changed in the fol­low­ing years.

So, from a visual stand­point, we may have estab­lished some of the rules that are now con­sid­ered good visual rules for Web 2.0 com­pa­nies. Of course, fea­ture wise, we didn’t have RSS (it had not achieved the level of pop­u­lar­ity it now has) and worked largely as a walled gar­den (all inter­ac­tion hap­pened on our site) but Boo.com was prob­a­bly sit­ting closer to a Web 2.0 sen­si­bil­ity than most com­pa­nies that existed at the time.

Con­clu­sion

Based on past his­tory, the com­plex­ity that existed back then has largely dis­ap­peared, mak­ing it pos­si­ble for Boo.com to exist in the web 2.0 world. The mar­ket has also evolved to the point where many of the inno­va­tions first intro­duced by Boo.com are now con­sid­ered main­stream and where many of its bar­ri­ers to entry seem to have dis­ap­peared. This means that Boo.com could have a chance at sur­viv­ing this round. How­ever, one would have to be care­ful about over­spend­ing on adver­tis­ing (a crime that Boo.com was respon­si­ble of, with its mas­sive multi-country ad bud­get). A ques­tion that remains on the via­bil­ity of the brand is whether the errors of the past have dam­aged the brand to a point where it would not be able to come back. It is prob­a­bly the most dan­ger­ous fac­tor in the rebirth of Boo.com and, if the neg­a­tive press of the past over­shad­ows the re-emergence of this com­pany, it could be a fatal flaw that could ulti­mately make this a bad idea.

I wish much luck to the par­ties involved in the relaunch. Hope­fully, they won’t suf­fer from the same arro­gance we suf­fered from in the first iter­a­tion of the com­pany and will be able to build a strong busi­ness around this brand.

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