Here Lies ZoZa.com

Ah, the high-flying dot-com days. Who can forget them?

Those high-rolling years from about 1997 through 2001 were a time of hysterical money spending as company after company grabbed up domains and set up websites.

Then came the crash.

Today's FamilyFirst site is a bittersweet account of one such business who was a victim of the bust. It was called ZoZa.com. Today's website explores what it took to build this online clothing store, including the technical details of the back end. It also explores what went wrong and why.

The purpose of the site, according to its founder (the former CTO of ZoZa) is to aid the technical staff in their job hunting. Five years later, no doubt they have found work (or gotten out of IT, as many unfortunately have). But the site remains as a haunting tribute to a time when a good business plan was not nearly as important as being the first one on the block with an online presence.

You take a page-by-page tour through the online store that once was. A sample experience of purchasing an item is duplicated, including checkout.

The online store was quite sophisticated, especially for 2001. A customer could choose to let his personal information stay in the store's database, or delete it. Few online stores give you that option even today.

And the details of the database-driven back end are provided as well.

And finally, the site has this epilogue:

We built a good e-commerce platform, but unfortunately sales were slowly building just as the dot com economy collapsed. We had built a company to handle the promised phenomenal sales based on the Ziegler's self-promoted public profile. That never happened. The costs of building our sales and fulfillment capabilities, combined with ZoZa's lack of credit in the apparel manufacturing world caused us to go through SoftBank's 17 million quite quickly.

Such was the story of many other dot-bombs.

Enjoy the site, a monument to a more naïve time.

Click Here

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