Target to take its website inhouse

I've known that Amazon offered a service where it powered the back-end of a third-party's website. What I didn't realize was that large companies with a strong online presence were still using the service in 2009.

When I first heard about the service, I thought it was brilliant. It was the early 2000's, maybe 2002 or so - the consumer marketplace was at an inflection point: e-tailing was becoming more popular and less of a niche market. But what would the marketplace look like at the end of the transition? Would traditional retailers change shape and exist in both the offline and online space? Could traditional retailers thrive in an online setting? Or would the market be divided into 'traditional' retailers and 'online' retailers?

Add to this uncertainty that creating an online presence - specifically those that include product inventories or ordering capabilities - can require new skillsets, technology, and hardware with high start-up costs. Add to that the high propensity for failure and the short window in which to make an impression in a changing market, and I thought it made great sense for companies to outsource their e-commerce operations to Amazon. I thought the service would primarily be an interim solution until each company built out its own e-commerce capabilities.

I hadn't thought about this service in years, until I came across an article which stated that Target would be discontinuing its partnership with Amazon in 2011 and taking its website inhouse.

So for nearly 10 years, the target.com backend has been powered by Amazon. I was completely surprised by this. But upon closer consideration, I can see how my thinking was biased.

My experience has been primarily with companies whose primary priority are its websites. In my personal experience, companies are filled with people who are technical (or used to be technical) and there are teams dedicated to disaster recovery, data redundancy, performance, security, up-time, etc.

Looking at it through that lens, building and maintaining a quality website seemed, if not easy, certainly not difficult. Add some resources with specific front- and back-end skillsets, expand a few data centers, add resources to the on-call schedule, and the site is up and running.

But, I suppose, not all companies are like the ones I've experienced. Building out a basic html site may be easy enough, but building out and supporting the infrastructure to maintain a highly-available, integrated, redundant, secure ordering site is complex. And for companies whose core business is distinct from that effort, it may not make sense to bring all that effort inhouse.

While this news rated just a few paragraphs in the local paper, I found it very eye-opening. And good luck to Target in this endeavor!