Google's Big Ecommerce Bet Is A Trainwreck (GOOG, AMZN)

Last year Google launched a fashion shopping site, Boutiques.com, to great fanfare. How's it doing? Traffic is down a whopping 94% according to Google AdPlanner, Signature9 says. Quantcast also shows a pretty sharp decline.
Boutiques.com came out of Google's acquisition of Like.com, a visual shopping site. Boutiques.com had everything to succeed. It not only had Google's weight and talent behind it, but it recruited plenty of influential fashion bloggers to start boutiques on the site and had a launch party with A-list celebrities.
So what happened?
It seems that selling stuff online, and in particular selling fashion online, is a really hard and specific thing. Even Amazon, the undisputed king of e-commerce, had to relent and buy Zappos after failing to compete with them. And it's not clear Amazon can make its Gilt and Vente Privée killer, MyHabit, work.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/rLhB67CGrbk/google-boutiques-com-2011-6