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Boo.com was a British Internet company, founded in 1998 by Swedes Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander and Patrik Hedelin, who were regarding as sophisticated Internet entrepreneurs in Europe by the investors because creating and operating a online bookstore named Bokus.com, the third largest one in the book e-retailer around the world in 1997, before founding the new business Boo.com.

Company vision
Boo.com vision was to become the first largest online sports e-retailer around the world instead of just as a European brand. It also planned to set up stores in both Europe and America simultaneously.

Brand name
The brand name was initially come up as Bo.com, which was inspired from the female movie star Bo Derek, and by purchasing the final domain name Boo.com with $2500 form a dealer, the company overcame the problem that domain Bo.com has already existed.

Target market
The targeting customers of Boo.com was positioned as 'young, wealthy and fashionable people between 18 to 24 years old, who was expected to be attracted by sports and fashion brands offered from Boo.com.

Brand strategy
To facilitate shopping experience, Boo.com created a virtual shopping assistant, Miss Boo, in the site to assist customers to finish the whole shopping process with tips given at each step. Boo.com also developed the technology that allow online customers to put their preferred products onto 3D models and then visualize from all sight views.

Problems with the management
Boo.com management team can not provide answers of the goal of the website visitors, the conversion percentage, each customer's minimum spend and their purchase cost to one of their going-to-be investor Pequot Capital before launching, and the founder planned to release it with thousands of tasks that some of them need to be done by employees have not been recruited.

Problems with the supply channels
At the beginning, it was difficult to become a distribution channel of prestigious sports and leisure brands as they have already have their own distribution network with high street and small retailers. These brands also concerned that their brands values would be negatively influenced when their products were sold cheaper on Boo.com or with different price in different countries.

Excessive expenditure on marketing activities
$135 million of marketing investment was cost by Boo.com within 18 months in order to set up a worldwide online sport and fashion brands retailer in short term, which was one of the main reasons for operating out of finance at last. Some of the investments are shown below.

1. To attract consumers to shop on Boo.com, it developed a brand-new Internet virtual technology with which consumers could drag their intended clothes on the virtual 3D body model and then view it from whatever angles and distance they want. The investment on this technology cost Boo.com over $6 million to develop and $0.5 million every month to maintain.

2. Hundreds of staffs in many countries were employed and paid for local marketing purpose in order to set up a global brand at the beginning.

3. Boo.commade the expenditure of $25 million on advertising and public relations marketing before it opened and sold products.

Excessive discounting
Ecomomadopted deep discounting policy which offers customers fifty-percentage discount with discount services. As a result, Ecomomlost money every time it sell products because half the price was even lower than the cost. In addition, Ecomom did not make any limitation to the deep discount, so that even repeat customers could be offered with the 50% discount when shopping.

Excessive expenditure on marketing
Ecomom excessively spent on marketing its products, for example the expenditure in search engine marketing is not proportional to the return of investment.

Wrong strategy
Ecomom did not understand that abuse of discount would have a negative impact on the company when striving to develop new audiences and expend markets.