Last year CIO profiled six companies and their e-commerce business models in our Case Files series. Now we're looking back to see how they did and what we can learn from their experiences. We found both folly and wisdom in this tribe of e-business entrepreneurs. The psychology a year ago was very exuberant toward dotcoms and now is rife with cynicism. There was a tremendous amount of innovation and a tremendous amount of learning that took place over the last year.
Furniture is a notoriously tricky industry.
Convincing customers to buy furniture online was the easy part. But with the increase in usage came a dramatic jump in customer dissatisfaction. The company failed to factor in the logistics and costs involved in shipping such a bulky commodity cross-country and had no way to track orders. We invested a lot of money in technology to track orders so that they could let customers know where their delivery was in the system. But we ended up having to do everything manually.