Target relaunched website - what a disaster

Target did relaunch last week their website. Target did everything than a good job and will eventually lose a lot of money and customers. Target is one of the biggest competitor to Walmart, but with the new website they did lose the race.
Target worked two years to build the new website, mostly to move away from Amazon who did Target's online operation. Target was trying to make it simpler and easier fro their customers, but this did not work out.

Then



Now:



This week when they launched the new website Target.com, I was lucky enough to have an order lost on along with 10,000 other people. Here are some of the comments on their page… no one likes the new site. Their problems are effecting returns, purchases, quantity of available merchandise, account history, registries and coupons. Pretty lame - if you haven’t checked it out, hurt your eyes and go to www.target.com .
Amanda Johnson
Your website changes are terrible. I can't access my registry at all >.< Major FAIL.

Mel White
Wondering when you intend to have the website working properly so I can actually do my baby registry? Dosn't work at the store either...

Katie Bean
your new website is terrible! it looks bad and is NOT user friendly!
Ayumi Tomioka
totally, completely, extremely dissatisfied and upset with target new website
Valerie Manke
Your new website is horrible, it doesn't add discounts and it is harder to shop it on a tablet device! What is up with it?
Abbie Rae Menning
So I, as well as many others posting on here, am SO frustrated with the new website and the fact that my wedding shower is a week away and the registry stuff is crap now. And I find it really disappointing to see that Target has stopped responding to peoples posts, or when they do, they tell you to call some number, even though they know you will be on hold for hours. Customer satisfaction is being sucked down to almost non existent, all because a website was launched prematurely.
Nicky Dove
your new webite is the most horrible thing ever!!!!
Shandra Adkison Dean
What is going on with the coupons??? It says the link is no longer available when trying to print them... I'm trying to head out to the store to get some stuff & our Target doesn't have it to where you can print the coupons there! Please get this fixed FAST!!!
Lauren Bell
Please fix the new web structure. It's hard to navigate and it is not working. I can't log into my baby registry and when it says to go to Target Help page, it says that's down.
Alicia VanSloten Barnard
Are you having problems with the coupons on your web page. They aren't printing. =(
Mark Webster
you website suck balls, too much going on keeps freezing, i go to anyother web sit and it is just fine...fix the crap
Xiomy Juarez
why is your new website super slow!?
Candace Knight Milliron
Is there a problem with your couponing page on the website? I keep trying to print two coupons, and I get error messages that the page is no longer available. Thanks!

Talley Spain Williford
Trying so hard to be patient with your new website, but considering I placed an order and it shipped 8 days ago and I cannot search for the order on your website, through the phone system, nor can it by found by your customer service reps I am losing confidence. I never received a tracking number, so I can't track it through the shipper website. I still cannot access any previous orders in addition to this most recent one. Your "contact us" section of the website will not allow any messages to be sent b/c I need to enter "valid questions or comments." My baby registry is inaccessible and this has been going on for like a week now? When will you guys have this straight?

From WSJ.com:
Two years in the making, Target.com's new platform is easier to shop, has faster checkout and more closely resembles the store shopping experience, Target Chief Executive Gregg Steinhafel said in an interview.
Target built the site and will handle all related operations. For the past decade, Target outsourced nearly all of its online operations to Amazon.com Inc. The Seattle online retailing giant provided software to run the Target.com website and hosted the sale of Target goods directly through Amazon.com. In addition, Amazon ran the call center and most of the warehouse operations for Target, shipped the products to customers and handled customer service.
When the new website launches, Target will no longer sell its wares on Amazon, a Target spokeswoman said.

Target has room to grow. It is only the 22nd largest Internet retailer in the U.S., with $1.33 billion in sales last year, according to trade publication Internet Retailer. In contrast, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. ranks as the sixth largest Internet retailer with an estimated $4.4 billion in sales. Amazon is No.1, notching $12.95 billion in sales last year.




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Facebook best way for social advertisement

The daughter of a friend of mine is participating in a model contest. The winner of the contest flies to NY for a photo shooting. The winner is the person with the most votes during a specific time period. You can only vote once a day for one person in the contest.
His daughter is pretty but with over 1309 participants it would be hard for her to win or to come into the top 10, especially that there are some professional models in the contest.

Her father took a great approach which did so far bring her to the top 10.



But how did he do it?

He used his Facebook account. He has over 2,200 friends in Facebook and posted every day on his wall that his daughter is in a model contest with the link directly to her model card. He is as well asking in his posts that all friends shall tell their friends about his daughter and the contest. And it worked, she got so far over 1,100 votes and counting. She might not win but can make it to third place. The leader has almost 4000 votes and uses her own big Facebook network to get votes. It is amazing how far a person can come by utilizing social network, this would not have been possible a few years ago.

Even retailers are now using Facebook to mobilize the social network. Walmart offers special deals but only if enough people like a certain wall post. And it seems to work, Walmart started this advertisement a few weeks ago and almost doubled their fan base and traffic on Facebook. And it is perfect advertisement to get the user from FB to Walmart.com




Walmart was in June by around 900,000 fans, now Walmart has over 2.5 million fans. I call this a perfect social Growth.



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Twitter gets serious in making money

Twitter is now four years old and in terms of Internet age almost an adult but does still work like a child which does not care about money.
However it is changing, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams is giving his CEO position to Dick Costolo the COO who did architect and lead the new advertising efforts.

Williams will focus completely on product strategy, effective immediately, he wrote in a post on the Internet company's official blog on Monday.
The move, Twitter's second CEO switch in its four-year history, underscores Twitter's increasing efforts to evolve from a popular, free-to-use Web phenomenon into a revenue-generating business that can justify the trust investors have bestowed upon it.
So far all attempts failed to generate enough money to get Twitter into the black numbers.

Twitter did start this year with some advertising and it seems they have high click through rates, however it is doubtful if they are to count like display ads.

The rates at which web surfers "click-through" on the ads, a measure that marketers use to track an ad's success, were "through the roof," Costolo said in an interview with Reuters on Monday. And he said that Twitter was on track to finish the year with a roster of advertisers in the "low hundreds," compared with the 40 or 50 companies that currently advertise on Twitter.

Interesting is that Costolo comes from feedburner.com which has to do with RSS feeds. Twitter was and is for me the next generation of RSS feeds. Costolo is a perfect fit.

The beauty of Twitter is that companies can have in their tweets tiny url links to brand pages, and we click on it because we think the target page has something interesting. This is nasally free advertisement, for now.

Twitter has over 165 million users which makes it the third biggest social network after facebook and zynga games.
But Twitter has not yet a good revenue model. Zynga makes a lot of money by charging their gamers to get special virtual goods or by sponsored virtual items in their games.
Facebook has a very active website (just short behind google). Each page has at least three ad placements and users spend many gorse a week to go through Facebook pages or to find new and old friends.
Even if Twitter is number 7 in reach, the page views per visitor and time spent is much lower than Facebook and google it is around the same and even lower than Walmart (which is ranked 51 in the US and 246 worldwide).




Let us assume the numbers above are correct and Facebook does make $900 million, then Twitter could be able to make $400 million.
And Twitter got recently redesigned (not yet to all users), but i still don't know where the ads will be and if i would click on an ad. I understand Twitter is selling keywords for their search results, but any attempt i tried, I did not find an ad, or maybe the tweet was not marked as advertisement and therefore i would not know, but i doubt it is legal not to mark advertisement.





Maybe, if companies have to pay $1 dollar for each follower, they could generate a few hundred millions extra. The top 23 tweeter have together 90 million followers.
The biggest company (besides celebrities) is CNN breaking news with 3.5 million followers.





But it would hard to change a free model suddenly in a paid model.
Twitter might think about closing their APi that no 3rd party can access Twitter without paying. Example: A brand page wants to show live tweets on their page or a developer can only offer a Twitter app if he pays for each tweet through his app.
Twitter did start already to buy 3rd party applications, but on the other side they helped Twitter to get big. It would be a not a good idea to cut all of them off.

Costolo has hard times coming up, to build a revenue stream which can bring Twitter into positive numbers but at the same time not losing too many users.

Advertising spending on social networking sites like Facebook will surge roughly 31 percent in 2010 to $3.3 billion, according to Internet marketing research firm eMarketer. Twitter must find a way to get a big piece of the cake to survive.

Trades of Twitter's private shares by investors on Sharespost, a secondary market for shares of private companies, in October imply a valuation of $2.5 billion.


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