Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

No question, Target got the chance to do it right, from the ground up. The downside: Target had to do it right from the ground up. There was no legacy code to get in the way—but there was also no legacy code that worked, stress-tested in actual use for years. If a new feature was too buggy, there was no old version to fall back on.

Target’s developers understood that. They figured it was OK. The site would go live, they’d work the kinks out as quickly as possible, soon there would be all sorts of great new stuff built on the wonderful infrastructure that was still invisible on opening day, and everyone would understand—right?

No. Customers neither knew nor cared that the new Web site was the product of two years of loving development and was bound to have a few hiccups at first. It didn’t matter to them that Target had to build from scratch because of the end of the Amazon deal or that all sorts of wonderful new features would be coming once the site was stable.

All that customers saw was that their passwords, which worked fine on Monday, didn’t work on Tuesday. They couldn’t edit their wedding registry lists. They could no longer track orders they had paid for a day or two before.

From a Target customer’s point of view, that’s one seriously broken E-Commerce site.

Any customer who wasn’t facing those big issues was still likely to be annoyed by the new Target.com on opening day. The site was very pretty, but it wasn’t very useful for regular customers. The weekly newspaper ad wasn’t showing up. Neither were coupons. A large digital countdown clock on the homepage (and extremely long homepage) warned that today’s Daily Deals would end in so many hours, minutes and seconds—but the link went nowhere.

In fact, lots of the links were dead ends—delivering customers to very pretty error pages featuring Target’s mascot dog. (There’s a downside to using pictures of a dog mascot all over your site, including error pages: At a certain point, customers are likely to start really hating the sight of that little dog.)

No doubt all of that will soon be fixed. Much of the site was working far better on Wednesday than on Tuesday. But it will take a lot longer before customers feel like the new site is as good as the old one was—which, of course, means better than the old one.

And until then, that greenfield site isn’t going to be any retailer’s dream.