Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

That has actually been tried in brick-and-mortar stores, and sometimes it works. It certainly makes for a more orderly, less crazed experience for both shoppers and associates, and for special sales that are only available at a particular retailer, many shoppers are willing to wait in line for their chance to get in. Why shouldn’t it work online too, by counting new online customers as they arrived, monitoring each shopper’s session to spot abandoned shopping carts, and diverting new arrivals to a queue when the site got too crowded?

There was another benefit Target probably hoped to get from limiting the number of simultaneous customers in the online store: lower IT costs. Target had no real experience with IT operations for a major E-tail site. How much hardware and bandwidth did the retailer need? Unknown. But it was possible to calculate how much time an average customer spent on the site, and how much bandwidth and CPU time that required. Choose a limit for the number of customers, do the math and multiply by a fudge factor, and the result should be a reasonable estimate that would control costs and keep things nicer for Target.com shoppers.

It was a very interesting idea. And now we all know that it didn’t work. Customers don’t behave during a big sale anything like “average” customers, and they require much more than the average amount of server power. Online customers who can’t get into a site won’t wait, even if that’s what the site explicitly tells them to do—they’ll assume their web browser has frozen or the site has crashed.

And that improved customer experience? It turns out that customers don’t notice that during a sale. They’ll grumble about long lines and scream about major problems, but they don’t actually seem to appreciate when everything works smoothly. For good or ill, online shoppers know they can open more tabs and be in multiple online stores at the same time. They’d rather wade through a slowly responding site than wait in line.

And while E-Commerce capacity management sounds like a great idea, it requires huge amounts of data from operational experience—experience that won’t necessarily transfer even from one site to another. Buying too many racks of servers (or renting too much cloud capacity) turns out to be relatively cheap insurance against a capacity crunch.

In short, everything about Target’s bright idea was wrong-headed. It’s easy to see that in hindsight.

Except, of course, that if it had worked, Target.com would have a significant competitive advantage—lower E-Commerce operational costs, happier customers—and that wrong-headed idea would have been brilliant.

If Target is lucky, it won’t have to go looking for that kind of brilliant idea again.