H&M didn't learn from its mistakes as the apparel retailer experienced its second website crash in three months after the launch of its online exclusive Versace Cruise 2012 Collection. The initial launch of its Versace collection in November 2011 resulted in a crash that made the list of the 7 Most Stunning Website Failures of 2011.

 

The collection, which was launched on Jan. 19 and sold out almost immediately, caused the retailer's website to go down and elicited a strong response from its customers. H&M sent out a tweet stating "We're very sorry for the tech problems during today's #VersaceforHM launch. We're working on expanding capacity for more visitors."

 

A few followers replied to the tweet to voice their dissatisfaction with the company's e-commerce strategy. One reply read, "@hm your website and online ordering service/delivery is one of the worst I've used!" and another recalled the retailer's previous site crash, sarcastically saying "@hm Big surprise. BIG surprise."

 

In an official statement to Fashionista about the technical difficulties, the company explained how the unexpectedly high and immediate interest from its customers caused the crash.

 

"Due to the high volume of customers shopping the Versace Cruise collection our website was down for a few hours," said H&M in the statement. "We have been working hard to solve the technical problems that occurred to avoid that this will happen again in the future. We of course hope that as many customers as possible had the possibility to shop. This is a limited, one-off collection which is supposed to sell out in a couple of days but the interest from our customers highly exceeded anything we could have expected."

 

The company, which has been behind on getting a fully functional e-commerce site up, also announced on its Twitter that it will launch an online shop in the US this coming fall. The launch was postponed in order to "launch the best possible shopping website for our customers!"