If you have a premium product, at a premium price, it’s unlikely you would sell it out of a rundown, poorly lighted store that smells vaguely like stale meat. Yet somehow many of us forget to apply that same reasoning when it comes to selling our products online. The availability - and look and feel of your presence online - is your store front.

I’ve long been a fan of Saddleback Leather. However, their motto: “They’ll fight over it when you’re dead” fell short in January. You see, it’s hard for your family to fight over the thing that you can’t even purchase… Saddleback Leather had a completely foreseeable, and absolutely preventable outage. From Dave Munson, the CEO:

“I’ve always dreamt of one day having a really fast and easy website for you to enjoy. So, we decided to leave our slow and clunky old website and start building one on a new and different platform. The contract expired Dec. 30th, 2017, but the new site wasn’t fully ready yet. We flipped the switch anyways and all Gehenna broke loose. The super fast, fun and easy website… wasn’t fast, fun or easy and we wasted a ton of time and irritated the heck out of our favorite people. People couldn’t check out, set up accounts or even add stuff to their carts. So, we paid a ton of money to get our old slow and clunky back again until we get this new site just right. “

To make up for it, last week I received an apology letter sent by “El Presidente” Munson with an 11% off coupon. 11 % because Munson has recently celebrated 11 years of marriage to his wife, Suzzette. As a side note, it’s a perfect example of how to apologize to your customers when you screw up. This guy made a mistake, is paying for it by paying for his old site while continuing to develop the new, and is giving customers discounts with a coupon aptly titled: "IAMSORRY."

Ironically, as a fan and customer, I don’t recall the old site being slow or terrible. On the contrary, when I visited early in January, their “new and improved” site felt clunky and disjointed. The wrong images were coming up for products and many items reported being “not available.”

In the world of environmental health and safety, “all accidents are preventable” is the holy grail of compliance. We believe that with the right forethought and planning, the same is true with virtually all products and storefronts online.

At AKF we are fond of saying “an accident is a terrible thing to waste.” While the exact details of what went wrong are not disclosed, the motives were:

- They took a concept that presumably worked great in beta testing live without testing under full load.

- Munson made the decision to push out something that wasn’t yet great to save money by exiting a contract by the end of the year.

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The result is lost sales from when the site was down, lost customers who may have been trying the website for their first time and won’t be back, an 11% haircut of sales for the next week, and a fan base - many of whom have been very vocal on FaceBook - that is verbally expressing their disdain to see the company they have counted on for unquestioned quality in the past didn’t settle for quality first this time.

The days of customers quickly forgiving their favorite retailers for not being equally as great online are waning. Make sure you have a solid strategy and the right expertise in your corner when it comes to greatly affecting your customer’s ability to purchase or better interact with your product.

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