ECommerce - Levi Strauss key reasons for the failure of...

1.0 Introduction The Internet has been compared to the California Gold Rush of 1849 in which Levi Strauss built a Fortune 500 company by supplying miners with clothing (White Paper, Building an E-commerce Network). Levis managed to reap from the opportunities of the California Gold Rush. However, in an attempt to achieve the same success with the Internet and ecommerce, Levis failed to succeed. This paper investigates key reasons for such failure and identifies generic critical success factors as a guide for other business who wishes to follow in the path of ecommerce. à ¼ 2.0 Levis In the 1990s Levis Strauss was well regarded as a clothing brand by fashion minded young consumers. However since then, market share has dropped 16.9% and†¦show more content†¦However impressive the web site may be, customers will get frustrated by the length of time it takes for a page to download and the costs that would incur from being connected to the Internet for so long. According to Keller and Staelin (1987), the information given to a B2C web site should be adequate for the consumer to make a decision and care should be made to not provide too much information, as this is likely to result in information overload. Levis failed to comply with this theory since their web site offered over 120 items with 3,000 possible variations. The amount of information there is overwhelming, it is very likely that consumers were overloaded with information. The timing of launching the web site was poorly planned. The success in selling online will depend on the strength of the company core operations. Since these were failing and the company was not performing so well. Offline sales dropped 15% and the loss of its connection with teenage customers affected the success in selling online (Standley, 1999). Despite its problems in its core operations, Levis could have tried to improve the success in its B2C web site. It could have used the web site to create a clearer brand identity and differentiate itself from competitors. They could have also used data mining to gain a better understating of their market (Standley, 1999). Allowing only J.C. Penney and Macys the permission to sell online would create problems with Levis other