Australian Dept. Store Chain's Website Crashes and Can't Get Back Up 156
McGruber writes "Myer, Australia's largest department store chain, has closed its website 'until further notice' at the height of the post-Christmas (and Australian summer) sales season. The website crashed on Christmas Day and has been down ever since. This means Myer will see no benefit for those days from booming domestic online sales, which were tipped to hit $344 million across the retail sector on Boxing Day alone. Teams from IBM and Myer's information technology division were 'working furiously' to fix the problem."
Re:Cost center only? (Score:5, Interesting)
Another company that sees its IT department as a cost center only and not a part of the company responsible for bringing in revenue?
Now, perhaps, its management will have another thought about that, but probably not -- probably they are thinking about assigning blame and who should get fired.
I have no doubt Coles/Myer do that but the problem is far, far worse.
Coles/Myer deliberately dont want Australians shopping online, not just at Myer but anywhere online because products are so ridiculously overpriced in Australian retail stores it's not funny. You're looking at paying 50-250% more just by purchasing the product in Australia rather than from an overseas vendor or even an Australian vendor that practices drop shipping [wikipedia.org] who pays Australian wages and taxes (so there goes the wages and taxes arguments).
Retailers and distributors deliberately keep prices high because historically Australians have never had a choice. Then along came the internet with overseas shipping and all of a sudden revenue dropped. The golden cow they've milked to a husk finally stopped giving milk. Now the old box retailers like Coles/Myer are upset about it. They've been doing everything from trying to raise a tax on overseas sales to suing dropshippers, pretty much everything except competing in an attempt to go back to the glory days when Australians had no choice but to suck up their stupidly high prices.
So it's less incompetence on Myer's planning part and more a complete failure in Coles/Myer's business model.
I'll add to that with an example (Score:5, Interesting)