Comments on: ASOS Life – FAIL!

By: Robbb

Robbb — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 15:35:42 +0000

Yeah, i have to say i was on it and left because its unusable. You post somthing, and it doesnt appear!!! Not good.

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 10:47:50 +0000

I 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.

By: sturban

sturban — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 07:53:32 +0000

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