and were around $500,000 for the fortnight prior to the site being shut down. The fundamental problem was that the company was following an extremely aggressive growth plan, launching simultaneously in multiple European countries. This plan was founded on the assumption of the ready availability of venture capital money to see the company through the first few years of trading until sales caught up with operating expenses. Such capital ceased to be available for all practical purposes in the second quarter of 2000 following dramatic falls in the NASDAQ presaging the "dot crash" following the dot-com bubble. Boo was one of numerous similar dot-com company failures over the subsequent two years. One Boo.com manager acknowledges that the company's failure was that global marketing and advertising costs too much, and that managers and technology invest too little. It spent $135 million of its investment in 2 years. Problems with users experience The boo.com website was widely criticized as poorly designed for its target audience, going against many usability conventions. The site relied heavily on JavaScript and Flash technology to display pseudo-3D views of wares as well as Miss Boo, a sales-assistant-style avatar. The first publicly released version of the site included many large pages; the home page, for example, was several hundred kilobytes which meant that many users had to wait minutes for the site to load, as broadband technologies were not widely available at the time. The site's front page contained the warning, "this site is designed for 56K modems and above". The complicated design required the site to be displayed in a fixed-size window, which limited the space available to display product information to the customer. Navigation techniques changed as the customer moved around the site. The site's interface was complex and included a hierarchical system that required the user to answer four or five different questions before sometimes revealing that there were no products in stock in a particular sub-section. The same basic questions then had to be answered again until results were found. Excessive expenditure on marketing Within 18 months, $135 million was spent on marketing by Boo.com. Boo.com spent $25 million on advertising and public relations marketing before it had even opened to sell products. To attract consumers, the site developed a new Internet virtual technology with which consumers could drag their intended clothes onto a virtual 3D body model, and then view it from whatever