New 'cheap-chic' 'Missoni for Target' line crashes web site 9/13/11 

When the highly awaited release of Missoni for Target launched online 9/13/11, they were obviously not prepared for the amount of traffic the new products would bring. The entire Target website went down, worked intermittently through the afternoon, and was not completely restored until 11pm. By 8am EST Harlem, Brooklyn AND Manhattan were all sold out of Missoni’s for Target. Pieces from the low price Missoni collection at Target are mostly under $40, while Missoni high-end Italian designer’s clothes at Bergdorf Goodman cost up to $12,000.

The products were made available online at 6am. By 7:47 am, the home page was down with a “connection timeout” error, and by 8am Target had put up this courtesy page that said the site problems were being worked on.

In an unusual fumble for the large retailer, Target was unprepared for online shoppers’ hunger for the items. The Target.com site was wiped out for most of the day; the company said that demand for items was higher than it was on a typical day after Thanksgiving, and that is usually the biggest shopping day of the year.

On Twitter and other social media sites, thwarted shoppers posted furious messages and commiserated about the site’s failure, with a few bragging that they had made it through in the brief periods that Target.com was working.

Marketing experts said the blunder was amateurish, although they said it should not have any lasting effect on Target’s reputation.

The problems came just three weeks after Target, which had been relying on Amazon’s back end for its Web site, switched to its own platform. But a spokesperson said the crashing of the site was caused solely by demand for the products.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09.....-site.html

There were other ways to get the merchandise. Racked, a shopping blog, advised readers to call Target’s toll-free number to order items by phone. Some posters on Twitter suggested using the mobile site. And by 5 p.m., after the products had been available for only 11 hours, eBay was listing 6,600 items for Missoni by Target.

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