ASOS Life – FAIL!
ASOS Life, is the community for ASOS, an online fashion community. When they said they were launching such a thing, i was excited, i thought it would be a cool place to go to for fashion and pop culture, a real good community. It launched and i was disappointed. It was a letdown, and really poor. I stopped using it after a week or so.
Last month i tried to give it another go. I tried posting, and getting involved, and still i did not think it was very good. I decided to start a topic on their own forum telling them why it was bad, which got a good response from the people on the forums, not so much from the people at ASOS.
They seemed to try and gloss over any criticism, with ”we are always improving”, “we are still new” and so on…Basically a load of excuses which i dont think were very good.
Whats wrong with it
- Well if you are starting a community/forum then you should read this. The layout and the way there community works is wrong, and not a traditional style which people use. You do not go to a forum, post something and that is that. You create a post first, and then decide about the forum it should be in. This has a whole lot of problems, including duplicate content.
- The way the information is presented is horrible. It is so hard to read and understand by looking at it.
- You cant post in a forum! A fundamental thing about a forum is that you can post things, and you cant! What i mean is, they have filters set up so that if you type something “customer service related” then your post is held in a queue. WTF!?!?
- And on the customer service note: When you go to the community it is littered with topics about customer services…This is supposed to be a community!
The problem they have really is, they have no idea of what they are doing.
The community has a 9 – 5 corporate feel… Allthe little activity there is, is done in work time. This is because the community is not community driven, it is very corporate. It definitely does not have a community feel, which it is supposed to have. They dont seem to understand that an online community is 24/7, not 9-5. They may go home after work, but the community remains online, and people will want to chat and discuss things etc. It seems that the people who work on the forum only “work” on it, i.e. dont use it in their own time. It should be an extension of your life, if you are involved with something like that. You should be the kind of person who enjoys using online communities, and uses them in your own time, which clearly doesnt seem the case.
There is not enough posting, not enough topics, not enough people involved. This is because of a snowball effect. The community is bad, which means less people use it, which means less topics are created.
Whos Fault is it?
Well Ilana Fox was in charge of the community, and she launched ASOS Life. A year on, it is a miserable failure, and she has gone on to other things. She was in charge, so it is down to her. You could blame the developers of the terrible community, but at the end of the day she was in charge, claiming to ‘invent it’. She doesnt seem to have a clue about how a community actually works, and was obviously out of her depth. She worked at The Sun and The Daily Mail on online community projects, which isnt exactly hard considering the amount of visitors those site gets – They were already a home run.
However she couldnt get the 5 million visitors/month which ASOS supposedly gets involved with the community…If you seen the community you would never imagine those kind of figures are for the main site; If you cant make a community on the back of 5million visitors/month you should definitely think of a new career (which she seems to have done).
She since left, and i was going to apply for that job, because it would of been a good challenge and i could do great things…But after i posted a few things on their community, they dont seem to take their own community seriously, and focus more on Twitter and Facebook. Maybe they have just given up on it, like its users.
How to fix it
The whole community/platform is rubbish. They need to either completely rewrite it, or use a tried and tested community and develop that; They could modify WordPress or VBulletin (or both) and make something groundbreaking and amazing; They wont, and it will stay the disappointing failure it has become. For some reason big companies would rather waste tens/hundreds of thousands of pounds on custom made things, when they could spend less and get so much more. They need to learn what a community is, what its for, and what it can potentially do, which is so much!
ASOS – Good @ Fashion, Good @ Customer Services, No clue @ Communities
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Great post and what timing in the same week ASOS launch their new social media Twitter based site. It’s quite interesting what you say we have a smaller mens clothing site not a ASOS clone as we started way before them on 1999, but even back then I was talking to the then “Bosses” about building communities and there view was that it’s a shop people come to shop and dont want interaction. Now I have taken over ownership of the company and started working on community based projects ie forum, blog and podcasts and still I find the hardest thing is to get interaction, I think you are correct with your snowball effect.
I do check the stats for our blog and forum and see that they do get reasonable traffic but lurkers so the challenge is engagement and interaction
posted on Saturday 13th March, 2010 at 7:53I think their “twitter based site” is actually better than ASOS Life, i took a look at it last week…But its hardly groundbreaking, such things already exist, It only syndicates peoples twitters, its not that impressive.
The problem they have is that there platform/system/script whatever you wanna call it is rubbish, when you add to that the fact they dont know how to manage or run a community you have a major failure on your hands. In their memberlist they have over 2 million people…If even 1% posted on their that would make it huge; But they cant manage that.
People dont want interaction usually on a shop site. You have to get them to WANT the interaction. If you have people visiting your Ecommerce store because its part of their life and not only because they wanna specifically buy something then you can make it work; ASOS have a fanbase and its seen through Facebook and Twitter, and they cant replicate it on their own in-house community which is a bit backward.
Sure they run comps. and give incentives etc. and that will get people invloved, and thats great…but that is very short term, it wont keep people using the community.
From a community point of view it’s terrible from top to bottom.
From a company/coperate point of view its a money loser, i wouldnt want my companies customer services run so publicly.
If done right it could make money, a good community can bring good things, and a bad one will only drive new customers away.
posted on Saturday 13th March, 2010 at 10:47Yeah, i have to say i was on it and left because its unusable. You post somthing, and it doesnt appear!!! Not good.
posted on Sunday 14th March, 2010 at 15:35What do you think? Add Your Comments