Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

For example, Target.com’s homepage still contains product images that might be clickable—or they might not be. Sometimes one product in a cluster of product images isn’t clickable, but everything else in the group is. In other cases, one corner of a large product image is clickable, but the rest isn’t.

That type of thing drives customers nuts. Spend enough time on the site and you’ll probably realize that the little red-and-white plus signs are the things to click on when you can find them. Sometimes a plus sign appears when you mouse over an image; sometimes not. Sometimes clicking an image opens a small product-information box; other times it’s a conventional link to a new page.

Those are all interesting ideas for an E-tail site’s design. Any one of them would make site navigation easier. (OK, things that only appear when you mouse over them aren’t quite as useful on a phone or tablet, where a touch is a click. Still, any of these ideas is worth considering.)

But using all of them means customers never know what to expect. And no matter how well the technology performs, not all customers will enjoy discovering how each image behaves. Some people just want to shop, and those frustrated shoppers aren’t going to be as likely to buy.

Other ideas that must have sounded clever continue to dog the site, too. Google ads still pop up when customers do a search. Think maybe it’s not helping conversion rates to have an ad for Ann Taylor pop up on a search for scarves or Nextag show up in a search for iPads? Even if Target’s prices are competitive, why invite customers to leave your site?

That felt like a rookie mistake when the site launched. It still seems like a rookie mistake, but it’s clearly something that Target is committed to as part of the site’s design. And it’s apparently going to take a lot more E-tail experience for Target to understand that this just isn’t how to keep visitors on the path to checkout at your online store.

When Target announced in 2009 that it was taking back Target Direct from Amazon, it looked like Target had a big advantage: It didn’t have to make all the mistakes that other E-tailers had suffered through over the previous decade. All that knowledge, experience and wisdom could go into a site that would let Target leapfrog over its rivals. And it had two years to get everything working right.

Things didn’t work out quite that way. It turns out that E-tailing isn’t just retailing plus IT. It’s more like chess: There’s a reason grandmasters know thousands of openings and endgames, along with how to move every piece. Rookie mistakes aside, there’s more to catching up with a decade’s worth of competitors’ experience than building a Web site. And whether being a latecomer will ever be an advantage is still unclear.

At least Target.com’s technical group knows the CEO is paying attention—close attention. Yeah, that’ll make everyone feel nice and comfortable as they try to close a decade-sized experience gap over the next year, when Steinhafel says he expects that Target.com “will be a positive contributor to our same-store sales increase, instead of the other way around.”