Amongst the few redeeming elements of Fascist Mussolini was the notion that he made the trains run on time.
In the eCommerce business, the tech equivalent is the efficacy of websites. You will remember that Obamacare, famously, had a huge fail on its website construction. This was the Mother of All Website Fails.
From an initial estimate of $93.7MM, the cost to complete ballooned to $292MM and was finally turned in for $1,700,000,000. HELLO, AMERICA!
These numbers come from an Office of the Inspector General investigation of HealthCare.gov. It is hard to believe this could possibly be true (Should we let these guys run a government run health care system?)
It is worth noting that the company who was contracted to do the work — Canadian firm CGI — had previously managed to run a $2MM contract for the Canadian Firearms Registry up to $2,000,000,000.
This, of course, raises the question — what genius hired these guys? Hint: It was not Mussolini.
Website fails of note
Two firms jump out as companies who should never have encountered this problem, but who did: Rent The Runway and Home Depot.
Rent The Runway suffered a tremendous blow when tech problems impacted execution and order fulfillment. Their Twitter and Facebook accounts were assaulted by tons of complaints.
At the end of September, RTR announced they were unable to accept new customers or new orders from existing customers until they sorted out some website tech problems. They were to be down until 15 October, but were back in business by 11 October.
RTR is a unicorn. Unicorns are not supposed to go down for simple shit like their website not being able to handle the freight.
RTR fired Marv Cunningham, its head of supply chain, who had just joined the company a year earlier from Target.
Home Depot reported earnings yesterday that were OK — sales increased by 3.6%, but the stock got hammered, falling 5%.
Why?
Because the Home Depot website sucks. HD decided to segregate its “professional builders” and “Do It Yourself” warriors into two websites that are not functioning correctly and which are neither good looking nor efficient.
This is a huge company that sells stuff that builders and DIYers need info on before they make a purchase. Every. Day.
Totally unacceptable performance
The public expects websites to be flawless, efficient, and UP. They are not willing to accept websites that are “iffy,” inefficient, and DOWN.
Bottom line it, Big Red Car
OK, here it is, dear reader. We have no mercy when a website fails, is inefficient, is not pleasing to the eye, or is DOWN.
But, hey, what the Hell do I really know anyway? I’m just a Big Red Car whose website is doing fine (I hope.).
