Reflect.com Lives On
Wednesday, September 20, 2000
by Mark Hurst
Back on May 8 of this year I covered Reflect.com and the accurate review it got in Business Week, saying that it's too hard to shop on Reflect.com.
Now a Red Herring article reports that Reflect.com just got another $30 million in funding. An anonymous source was quoted in the article saying that the investors "chipped in more money to [Reflect.com] to avoid the embarrassment that would come if they abandoned it... The company has not performed that well."
Who knows how valid the speculation is, coming from an anonymous source. But it seems reasonable that Reflect would be less than successful, given that it still takes over 20 clicks just to see the first product on the site. The customer experience is poor, and since the customer experience is the key driver of a website's success, it holds that Reflect.com should be performing poorly.
Which brings up this interesting quote from the Herring piece:
In a separate interview, Redpoint partner and Reflect.com director Tim Haley said, "You need to spend lots of money to create a strong brand identity, and that's what were doing." He added that "we're going to do whatever it takes to make this company successful," including digging deep into Redpoint's pockets for a third round.
Big sigh. Spending "lots of money" to create a "brand," and totally ignoring the customer experience, is a surefire recipe for failure. How long will it take, how many failed dotcoms will it take, for people with the big budgets to start spending on the things that matter? Times are tough enough in the Net industry right now without wasting money on "branding."
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