Oops! Your Web Site Is Out of Date

Serving up stale product hurts e-tailers and commercial Web sites at least as much as it does restaurateurs.

Outdated product specifications, merchandising messages or other online content are surefire recipes for customer alienation. But many Internet companies cannot afford the resources needed to constantly purge their sites of past-due elements.

"The task of updating content is high work and small reward," Giga Information Group analyst Andrew Bartels told the E-Commerce Times. "So, the volume of out-of-date online content will grow out of momentum."

Indeed, as a percentage of the ever-expanding mass of Internet content, outdated online material is on the rise, analysts said. Web site operators who stay on top of freshness, however, can avoid potentially costly customer run-ins.

Promotional Problems

Marketing content and other information that supports product data present the steepest challenge for e-tail site managers, according to analysts.

"Retailers' product specifications are largely evergreen," Jupiter Media Metrix analyst Matthew Berk told the E-Commerce Times. "But they have a second tier of content that is important to keep fresh."

That said, some retailers outsource fulfillment operations and rely on the inventories of third-party suppliers, Berk said. In such cases, in which real-time integration with suppliers can be problematic, customers can encounter outdated product inventories.

Friendly Florist

At New York-based 1-800-Flowers.com, a dedicated content team runs multiple promotions throughout the site and makes frequent content changes to maximize sales.

"We monitor sales four times a day and constantly swap promotions in and out depending on sales and availability," 1-800-Flowers.com director of Web marketing and development Robert Wilson told the E-Commerce Times. "Some promotions may stay up for just an hour."

Size Matters

Even if they do not deal in perishable goods, most highly trafficked sites like 1-800-Flowers.com stay current. But smaller niche sites with low sales and user volume often age untended, analysts said.

"On some specialist sites, where there is not a lot of business, the work-reward ratio [for updating content] is out of balance," Bartels noted.

This is less of a problem on commercial sites than it is on information-centric sites, he added.

For instance, the U.S. government's e-commerce policy Web site sports a home page showing year-old briefings.

Recent staff reductions in the content and technology arenas have made it especially difficult to invest in site maintenance, according to Berk.

Age Tracking

To manage content shelf life, analysts advised site operators to invest in content management systems and analytics packages that report on user traffic patterns.

"It is important to look at user behavior on a regular basis and pick up places where users are dropping off," Yankee Group analyst Lisa Melsted told the E-Commerce Times.

For its part, 1-800-Flowers.com uses analytic tools from NetGenesis and a proprietary content management system to maintain content currency and relevancy.

"The biggest challenge is identifying what content tasks are most labor-intensive and determining the best way to automate them," Wilson said.

Content Categories

Whether online content management is automated or manual, e-tailers should track how promotional and other supportive content correlates with products, said analysts.

"E-tailers should tag and categorize content in the same way they do with their products," Berk said. "This allows them to reuse content and use it as a merchandising tool."

In most online cataloging environments, he added, customers will grow impatient quickly if promotional content -- or "soft content" -- is outdated.

Rotten Links

Unfortunately, even if e-tailers regularly freshen their own site's content, links to stagnant or nonexistent sites may still lurk on the Web's search engines.

"Search engines are where you find the most cases of 'link rot,'" Melsted said.

The burden rests on individual Internet companies to stay in touch with search engines and minimize out-of-date links, analysts agreed.