Home Depot Learns The Best Laid Plans Lesson, In Spanish
Written by Evan SchumanIt’s human nature for business executives to take comfort in the belief that any major failure is the result of insufficient prep or someone having made the wrong assumptions. But Home Depot this month pulled the plug on a Spanish language version of its E-Commerce site after only six months, following an extensive seemingly properly executed series of consumer studies, surveys, focus groups and marketplace analysis.
The original goal was simply to make the site more appealing to Spanish-speaking customers of the $71 billion home improvement chain, who often prefer shopping in Spanish. But when the site launched, it had far fewer visitors than expected and many of the consumers who did visit clicked from other countries.
“Most notably, the visitors were not in a country where we do business,” said Ron DeFeo, Home Depot’s director of corporate communications. “The traffic overall was low so when you add in the fact that half aren’t even going to be customers,” the project quickly started to not make any sense.
But given that the overwhelming majority of the programming and design investment had already been paid, why pull the plug only six months after the site’s November launch? “Web sales are traditionally higher during the holiday season and we didn’t see the site performing to our expectations. The cost to update and maintain the site exceeded the amount of profit generated. The dollars can be used in more effective ways.”
DeFeo then sounded a tune that is becoming quite familiar in these economic crunch months. Joining the ranks of Borders and Canadian Tire, Home Depot has decided to now give unconditional priority to in-store operations. “I’m not saying that we’re not going to revisit (the Web), but our focus now is at the store level. The bulk of our sales are from the stores.”
Accepting for the moment—and given Home Depot’s reputation for thoroughness, it’s a very likely scenario—that the chain did everything that could have reasonably been done before launch, could the site have suffered from an overabundance of “if we build it, they shall come” attitude?
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
