Down To Business: A (Legit) Reason To Take Wal-Mart To TaskDown To Business: A (Legit) Reason To Take Wal-Mart To Task

Note to Wal-Mart: Get your act together. You can do a lot better. But first, a clarification, as this won't be your standard-issue screed about how Wal-Mart is destroying small-town America or running a sweatshop or shipping manufacturing jobs offshore.

Companies are beholden to their customers and shareholders, not to special interests. And for the most part, customers and shareholders love Wal-Mart, as they're both richer for the relationship. At some level, I can relate to the Wal-Mart resistance, as I'd rather shop at the local grocer and movie rental store than fight the hordes and line the coffers at Super Stop & Shopbuster. But this is a choice I get to make. It isn't up to some pencil-necked politician or public advocate to decide for me that Wal-Mart or some other big-box retailer isn't worthy of my community or dollars.

OK, so much for the disclaimer. Now for how Wal-Mart is really behaving badly ... by letting down its customers and shareholders. Specifically, it's bungling e-commerce and doesn't seem all that concerned about it. That's right: The company that put RFID and inventory management and point-of-sale automation and enormous-scale data warehousing on the map can't get its Web site right.

The October relaunch of Walmart.com was 13 months in the making. It focused on adding interactive features, based on Flash, OpenLaszlo, and other technologies, and on zipping shoppers around the site and through checkout faster. The upgrade included "hundreds of servers" and "the ability to add more as needed," a spokesman says. So why was the site down for 10 hours the day after Thanksgiving? "I'm afraid it was too much of a good thing," is all the spokesman will say, explaining that Walmart.com was hit with seven times the traffic over the previous year's Black Friday. The IT organization had load-tested the site for only double the traffic.

You could forgive Average Joe Retailer for abiding by that industry-standard practice. But Wal-Mart--by virtue of its size, profile, and reputation for IT excellence--must far exceed industry standards. While the sites of Macy's, Zappos, and Foot Locker also performed poorly during the post-Thanksgiving rush, they aren't in Wal-Mart's league.

Wal-Mart made a name for itself by using information technology not only to run a more efficient operation, but also to anticipate customer buying patterns and demand. Yet with its vast business intelligence gathering, and after promoting the Walmart.com relaunch and various product specials to the hilt, it had no way of knowing that customers would trample its Web infrastructure? It's one thing to run out of T.M.X. Elmo or Tap Dancing Mumble; it's another to hang a "closed for business" sign on a critical sales channel on one of the busiest shopping days of the year, especially when your overall sales already were on pace to be disappointingly flat for the month.

Wal-Mart's Black Friday debacle smacks of the rampant site outages and slowdowns circa 2000. Remember how eBay, Victoria's Secret, Ellis Island, and scores of other sites folded under a crush of unanticipated traffic? In fact, Walmart.com's debacle this season smacks of the Walmart.com debacles circa 2000, so this is a recurring problem for the world's biggest and most influential retailer.

Wal-Mart actually took down its site for the entire 1999 holiday season, choosing to start fresh with more products and features on Jan. 1, 2000. Then, 10 months later, it shuttered its online store again so that it could relaunch it yet again, this time on an e-commerce platform it had acquired three months prior.

Web site management isn't getting any easier. In October of this year, in anticipation of another Walmart.com retrenchment, we gave it the benefit of the doubt. "As long as Wal-Mart's trying, don't count it out," we said. On second thought, for every company with a substantial public Web presence, it's long past time to stop trying and time to start executing.

Rob Preston,
VP/Editor In Chief
[email protected]

To find out more about Rob Preston, please visit his page.