Their product was trying to be everything to everyone (bad sign), had burned through a lot of cash very quickly (really bad sign) and had ONE customer in the freaking Retail business (low margins).

Can’t believe they imploded so quickly though.

there is something — many things — rotten in denmark. putrid, really, tons of people should be royally pissed: n2n’s managers and staff, general catalyst’s own investors, etc

Console-based solutions like n2N put control of the site into the hands of business people. This is perfect for retailers who need features without IT. But these consoles run on shared instances; and they impose reasonable limitations that make top retailers uncomfortable.

I suspect n2N burned through much of the cash trying to build to VSD’s custom specs *and* also make customizations configurable for future clients — who will want it to function in a completely different way. It just doesn’t work for everyone.

Top retailers like VSD who need complete flexibility can’t avoid custom code. Custom code needs a dedicated environment where IT can write, run and maintain any piece of functionality on a dedicated instance.

Maybe Victorias Secret should have spent more time checking out their background before they jumped headlong into such a major change?

G

The real challenge was, as earlier poster Chris points out, this stuff is not easy. Victoria’s Secret is #16 on the IR500 list – comparable to our customers OfficeMax (#6) and BestBuy (#11), so we know something about what it takes to make this kind of site work. There are three major requirements in this class of deployment: handling the volume of visitors and transactions across literally hundreds of servers with fast response time, no downtime, no lost orders; integrations with rich interfaces, community applications and other front-end systems, as well as backend order management systems, financial systems, store systems, warehouse management systems, etc; and a flexible architecture and development framework that supports the making a Victoria’s Secret site unique from a BestBuy site or AT&T site. It takes many deployments, over many years of learning, sometimes the hard way, to end up with a platform that can meet these requirements for a wide range of customers.

With apologies to the candidates, this is one instance where experience is at least as important as the desire for change.

Cliff Conneighton
Senior Vice President
ATG

n2N was forced closed according to a friend and not because they delivered a dud. The shut down actually had something to do with the turmoil that the limited is going through. She claims that after the limited sold off a few of the brands they were running to nowhere, then loosing the leadership of their visionary COO back in the summer, the mis-steps continued. The limited has had major problems with product distribution, their same-store sales are anemic and the stock is heading in the wrong direction, fast. Add on that they were always an administratively bloated company and you have a recipe for disaster.

My understanding is that this was actually a closed project between the limited and a Boston VC firm and that they were barred from taking on additional customers until after the Vicky’s project was over.

No matter what the case, it’s a shame that so many folks had to loose their jobs over the mis-steps of a corporate giant.

bubble, bubble, toil and trouble

This type of engagement requires significant pre-planning, careful development, significant stress-testing, and full compliance with the payment card industry (PCI). Training for the marketing and administration teams – which, at Victoria’s Secret are quite large, integration into Limited Brands’ signifiant customer marketing database, and full volumes of all levels of documentation are also required.

This is much more of an undertaking than just dropping osCommerce or similiar product onto a web server and creating a theme.

eCommerce systems at this scale are highly prized by their developers and clients. In most cases, the clients retain the distribution rights to the applications – they did, after all, foot the bill – and will not distribute these often-patented customizations (i.e. Amazon.com’s one-click check-out) and optimizations to other companies without price tags likely higher than scratch development.

It’s all downhill from there. The only variable is how quickly the reality sets in and how different reality is from the initial proposal/demo.

I would just add that this is not the first time that a large non-Internet company believes that building a good Internet service is only a question of putting some millions on the table to hire developers and buy some hw/sw.
Also some media-companies failed in this (mainly european TV broadcasters)

I firmly believe companies should hold to their own core business … and in the Internet space there is no exeption to this rule!

Turns my stomach. Seen it a few times.

crack(s) got to em…….in every way. A Digishop e commerce cart cost about $500 without all the fancie platform techiespeak. VS should try THAT.

Jon