Indochino is a Canadian company with offices in Vancouver and Shanghai. It runs a website that sells made to measure suits over the Internet for as little as $199, which can be a great bargain if you don’t mind waiting for your suit to to arrive from China. Selling clothes over the Internet did not work out for Boo.com 8 years ago, but we’ve come a long way since then. They have an answer for many of the issues that would stop many of us from buying a tailored suit this way.

Firstly, they tell you how to take your measurements. Your register as a new user and enter your measurement details. You can pay $1 for a swatch, which they will send to you if you want to get a feel for the fabric before ordering and they will honour the first $25 of any alterations, which need to be made. They claim to have a return rate of only 3 percent compared with an industry average of 17 percent.

Jenny was horrified by the concept of an online tailors, because getting bespoke clothes is such a personal experience. You need someone to help you choose the colours, cuttings and fabrics. She feels that simple commodity items like socks can be sold over the Internet, but not suits.

Indochino’s suits are not meant to compete with Taville Row tailors, but they are seeking to use the Internet to offer made to measure suits in a similar price range to items bought off the rack.

The online catalogue has a choice of about twenty basic designs from conservative to fashion suits. They also supply coats, shirts, blazers and accessories. Some of the garments look quite snappy, although they have promised to upgrade the photos. (See the techcrunch article here)It might appeal to folks in western countries who don’t want to spend $1000 for a made to measure suit, but those of us living in Shanghai will do just as well for less than 1000 RMB using the same tailors.

Good luck to Indochino for their bold E-commerce endeavour.

Simply enter the desired item and poll the most popular price points. If something is very cheap then it is probably too good to be true and noone wants to spend more than they have to. As the Buddha said, we need to follow the middle way. This should give you enough information to bid vendors down until their prices are similar to Taobao.

For example, I just searched Taobao to find out how much I should pay for an 8gb Iphone and prices ranged from 4000 to 5000 RMB.

Don’t just take Taobao’s word for it. Double check your prices with other sites and sources for more local information. In Shanghai, I often lurk around and post questions on Shanghaiexpat.com. If you can ignore the trolls and gossip mongers then you can find a friendly and well informed community who are willing to share all sorts of helpful advice including a n upto date confirmation of prices for overhyped gadgets. See Shanghaiexpat for more details.

Thanks to Barry from my ITGS class for this tip about price guaging using Taobao.

Boo was started by three young Swedish entrepreneurs in 1998 (Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander, Patrik Hedelin). They devised a lofty project to build a stylish and global E-commerce site selling sportswear and high fashion over the Internet. They convinced a number of investors including LVMH and Bennetton to hand over $135 million to start a complex operation involving 400 young and talented employees in offices throughout the US and Europe. For a short period in the heady days of the first dot com boom they drummed up plenty of hype and media interest suggesting they were well on their way to establishing a global brand. They also played a major part in dragging the fashion industry on to the Internet as the likes of DKNY and New Balance became suppliers. Malmsteen captures the giddy excitement that pervaded the early days of the Internet when anyone with any sort of half baked notion could raise millions of dollars in startup capital simply by waving a can of dogfood at a web browser.

After 18 months Boo collapsed. Basically, the venture was far too ambitious. They wanted to become as big as Amazon.com overnight, but they had to support this concept with a very complex order processing and delivery system. This was very difficult and expensive to achieve in the timeframe they envisaged. One big issue was that the front end website did not work very well, because it was bogged down with 3D Flash graphics and slow, buggy javascript. The site worked very slowly unless you had a modern non Mac computer with a fast Internet connection. Remember this was in the late nineties when most people in Europe were still using dial up web access. Then there were the spiralling costs. Being stylish is expensive. They setup an expensive headquarters in London’s Carnaby Street and hired all sorts of managers, directors, consultants, designers and assistants before they had even earned a penny in revenue. The website launch kept being delayed due to technical problems (It didn’t work). When the website was eventually launched, the planned avalanche of business failed to materialise. A business burning through $10 million a month can hardly stay in business if it is only generating tens of thousands in sales. Boo was far too optimistic when it made its income projections. In the late nineties, E-commerce was still very immature and the only profitable European online retail operation at that time was Tesco.com who succeeded because they charged for delivery and already had an established logistics network to deal with stock handling and deliveries. The flood of business towards the Internet simply did not materialise during the first Internet goldrush. It is only now that online retailers are really starting to grab market share across Europe and the US.

Anyway, Boo’s investors lost confidence and stopped providing funds, which meant Boo could not afford to pay its bills, which forced it out of business. It was not all Boo’s fault. By 2000, the market began to wake upto the reality that technology companies with no earning potential were ridiculously overvalued. Technology share prices plummeted and investment capital dried up. Boo may have survived a funding crisis if it had happened a year earlier.

This is a great case study for anyone interested in the history of the Internet and speculative folly. It is to Malmsten’s credit that he is so upfront with all the problems that were largely created by his own grandiose delusions. He does go into a lot of mundane detail about his designer clothes and jet set lifestyle. It does read a little bit like the endless brandlists you see in American Psycho, which suggests Malmsten and his partner Kajsa Leander were full of style and no substance. Nevertheless, you can’t help think that they were very nice people with lots of energy and imagination, but were just a bit naive and inexperienced like many of their peers in the dot com boom and bust. I fear this case study may still be relevant in the web 2.0 era, because the market has gone mad again. New websites and services like Digg, Riya, Eyespot and Odeo may not be burning as much cash as Boo, but they are mostly offering something for nothing. Unless Google or Yahoo buy them out soon, they may end up broke, just like Boo.

I wonder what Ernst is upto now.

I have finally read the report and I have to say that it is the most entertaining white paper I have looked at and I am not just saying this as a sarcastic Englishman. The report clearly and concisely names and shames culprits of bad practice. It also gives credit where it is due. Here are a few of the highlights:

• The average score was 57 percent.
• Marks and Spencer topped the survey, scoring 81 percent.
• Clinton Cards was bottom of the heap, scoring only 25 percent. It did not put prices next to selected items so customers did not know how much the order cost them until they reached the checkout.
• Next confuses online shoppers by putting the search bar in different places throughout the site.
• The report accused web designers of vanity when it said visited links nearly always do not change colour except M&S. (This blog is guilty of that mistake too.)
• Debenhams provides clear categories, whereas Game buries them into a cluttered page.
• Navigation between pages is often unclear or incomplete. For example, The Body Shop almost hides its proceed to checkout button in the footer.
• Early Learning Centre has a clear progress indicator telling customers how many steps they will have before the transaction is complete.
• Accessorize does not provide alternative product suggestions in case a customer looks at an item and does not want it.
• Boots estmates the customers’ delivery costs right from the outset.

Following my post about Webcredible’s useability comic, I am very impressed with this agency’s clarity and methodical approach. I expect all the retailers studied will modify their e-commerce sites to make them more user friendly and they will probably make more money as a result. The framework of this study should be built into all e-commerce projects and web design education starting from key stage 3. Non commercial websites will need to use slightly different frameworks. Anyway, technology tends to move much quicker than curricula.

They had big problems as they failed to compete with cheaper more modern high street competitors leading to falling sales, a plummeting share price and years of instability.
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/marks/story/0,,1752140,00.html

When I went back to the UK in the summer, I noticed the shops were playing Latin music, had more colour than I remember and mixed up reasonably everyday commodity items (t-shirts, underwear) with more expensive garments.

I have just had a look at the M&S website (www.marksandspencer.com) to see if it deserves the useability award that webcredible (www.webcredible.co.uk) gave it. My first glance is that it is almost as good as Amazon’s e-commerce website. It’s simple, elegant and very easy to find what you want, although the button to add an item to a basket could be simplified slightly. You have to deliberately choose a quantity. I suppose that makes the transaction more deliberate. When I have digested the webcredible report and looked at the high street opposition, I will write a follow up.

This is a really good case study that I am going to dig around to get the back story about the rise, fall and then rise of Marks and Spencer’s.

I am surprised that the BBC did not include a link to Webcredible, the analysts who carried out this study or at least to an abtract of their research.