Finish Line is giving itself 90 days to decide if it will resurrect a cloud site that almost wrecked the chain’s holiday season with extensive functionality problems, all seemingly due to a major site refresh handled by Demandware.
“We believe the new site, which came online Nov. 19, 2012, cost us approximately $3 million in lost sales for the third quarter.
Following the launch, it became apparent that the customer experience was negatively impacted, evidenced by a decline in several key performance factors,” said Glenn Lyon, CEO of the $1.4 billion sports apparel chain with more than 640 stores in 47 U.S. states, during an earnings call on Friday (Jan. 4).
“We made a strategic decision on December 6 to transition back to our previous site, given the importance of the selling season.
As part of our contingency plan, we had kept our previous platform up and running, parallel to the new site, so we were able to swiftly engineer a smooth return to the original site. This has generated improved results versus what we experienced during the three-week period the new site was live.”
A few weeks earlier, Finish Line was singing a very different tune when it said the chain’s “aggressive omni-channel growth initiatives drove its decision to move away from legacy in-house-managed software to Demandware’s flexible and scalable cloud-based solution.”