Ferrit finally shuts down

Posted January 13th, 2009 in Miscellaneous Postings

I've been saying for the last two years that it was only a matter of time before Telecom's Ferrit closed its doors, and sure enough they announced yesterday that it would be closing on Friday.

This is an supplementary off topic post for this blog; normally all posts are about PHP, MySQL, Javascript etc. There has already been a MySQL post today and will be a Javascript/jQuery post tomorrow.

Naturally Telecom are trying to blame everyone and everything other than themselves, never mind that it was a poorly thought out idea and could have been much more successful it they'd either made it more like a shopping comparison search engine and/or approached each niche one at a time and got all the retailers in that niche on board.

If they'd helped out the retailers get on board as well, instead of expecting them to do all the integration work themselves, then they probably would have got more on board. What did all those 37 staff do?

I had a bad experience with Ferrit right at the start. I was trying to integrate Outdoor Action with their system, did a heap of work and then they went and completely changed the spec about how data was supposed to be supplied. Whenever I emailed people for support (and complaints) more and more people got included in the email and there were something like 10 people involved in the emails (although I never got any help). In the end I said enough is enough, didn't charge the customer and decided to not have anything to do with Ferrit ever again.

The scary thing is they launched a new advertising campaign just before Christmas - the rather odd "believe in Ferrit" campaign (believe what?) - and they probably knew at the time they would be shutting the doors in January.

What a complete waste of money! In fact that's the thing that's always pissed me off the most about Ferrit; they've been throwing $12m a year at it (presumably most of that's in marketing) and been losing money hand over fist. What about all those people out there with great ideas who can't get capital?

Anyway, enough of a rant for now. Here's some more reading:

• stuff.co.nz
• nzherald.co.nz and discussion
• aardvark.co.nz and forum discussion
• computerworld.co.nz and another one
• Lance Wiggs has a good round-up of blogs, tweets etc about the closure

One more rant... about a year or so after we gave up trying to integrate Outdoor Action they contacted my customer and made up some story about how the stuff being sold by them didn't fit into the types of products they were trying to sell. WTF?! If you want retailers at an online shopping mall you want them all... And here they are now trying to claim that retailers didn't want to come on board. It's hard to get them on board if you turn them away.