Paradise

Boo.com started operating it's head office in London in 1998, the founder of this company is Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander and Patrik Hedelin. The vision of the company is to become the worlds first online global sports retail site. Their targeted maket is people within 18-24 years old and people interested in sports and fashion brands stocked by Boo.com

Boo.com provide very good visual effect to customer in their website , when customer drag the products to models, and can zoom in and rotate, so that customer could see the products in different angles. There is an analyst of New Media Age, Nik Margolis said:" What i saw at Boo.com is simply the most clever web experience I have seen in quite a while." He think that the way of presentation the product is so imaginative. Initially, their business is very suceesfull with on-time delivery and the approach rate is 100%.

Before launch, Malmsten explain meeting to Larry Lenihan, representative from Pequot Capital who had made successful investment in AOL and Yahoo. The management team of Boo.com able to provide sales forecast but they were unable to answer many basic question.
For example, “How many visitors are you aiming for?” “What kind of conversion rate are you aiming for? How much does each customer have to spend? What’s your customer acquisition cost. And what’s your payback time on customer acquisition cost?” Because of management team couldn't answer those question, so investors are not interested in investing in the company.

Till 18th May 2000, Boo.com liquidated because of investors refuse funding in the company.

The reason of Boo.com liquidate are as follow:

i) Multiple Currencies
If a company decide to trade globally, they can't only offer US dollar, they need to find out some way to handle multiple currencies ranging from dollars to pounds and etc. The way to set up the pricing schema should be decided earlier.

ii) Multiple Languages
Basically, grammatical rules may be differ from different country. For example, British English and America English is totally different. The catalogue created by Boo.com doesn't take this issue into consideration.

iii) Front End is not technology
This is the main reason that can explain why Boo.com will be closed down. Front-end team should be the first to report to business development and marketing. A web-site is just an interface design, no matter how nice is it, it is not a marketing exercise. Boo.com should have be hired staff that expert in marketing also but not only people who knows how to desgin webpage.
There is people critics that : No matter how good your backend system are, the users will only remember your front end. Fail there and you will fail.

Reference:

1. Learning from the largest European dot-com failureContext. 17 June 2009, from http://www.davechaffey.com/E-commerce-Internet-marketing-case-studies/Boo.com-case-study
2. Strom, D. (2000). Lessons learned from the demise of Boo.com, 17 June 2009, from http://www.strom.com/awards/199.html