BrandsMart USA
Web Timeline
In November 1999, had a branded BrandsMart USA Under Construction page displayed at the company URL and started collecting emails for future promotions.
March of ’00, the first BrandsMart USA website was uploaded to the www.brandsmartusa.com URL.
Envisioned to be one of informational and educational use as directed.
In June of 2000 a Spanish[1] mirror of the BrandsMart USA website was posted. Every advertisement the company produced in both English and Spanish, as well as, every vendor rebate offered in every category the company authorized was uploaded to the website.
The present multi-million dollar Oracle platform does not offer a Spanish mirror and many other features of the in-house site.
October ’02, added to the “Research Center,” a “Product Research” section was added and brought the first product database of Major Appliances manufactured by Whirlpool and KitchenAid, General Electric and Maytag, hosted by JG Sullivan out of Chicago. At no cost to BrandsMart USA.
After many customer comments of not wanting to select between English or Spanish. In April of ’04, the site was revised to have a link for the Spanish site in the header.
In May of ’04 to insure the website will display in all browsers the website code was brought up to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) compliance.
BrandsMart USA utilized their extended warranty company to provide call center support in an early chat form.
BrandsMart USA negotiated a commission on part sales that the site referred through a link on the front page.
Also added to the website was the ability apply for the BrandsMart USA credit card. The credit application that was a major source of fraud.
In July of ’04 the BrandsMart USA website conformed to W3C compliance with both the HTML and CSS code.
In November of ’06 the site was brought in house with a new design by the lead programmer for BrandsMart USA. Offering a database for the first time with a majority of the products carried in the stores now online for informational and educational purpose.
Once the website was brought in-house the subject of cross platform compatibility and W3C compliance was never addressed. Bringing it up on numerous occasions, the issues were given low priority and would later cost the company later. The lead developer wrote code to comply with the dominate browser at the time, Internet Explorer. Mozilla had recently released their Firefox browser, which because of not being cross-platform compatible had issues displaying the BrandsMart website.
Even as cross-platform compatibility became an issue the compliance was only patched for the Mozilla browser, compatibility and accessibility continued to be a low priority.
MIS was unable to devote the priority of resources needed to enhance the product information. They only designed a single image to each product or the ability to host videos trying to make the site more robust, added third party enhanced content to provide an avenue to display videos and multiple images.
After much debate within the corporate executives about eCommerce, which from 1999 was a forbidden topic, with the great depression of ’08, the transition from analog to digital broadcasting and tube televisions to flat panel found BrandsMart USA lost without direction.
March of ’10 BrandsMart USA offered eCommerce for the first time causing a major shift within the company.
Between the internal bickering of executives and Product Specialists feeling betrayed that brick and mortar business would be effected. The executives had one camp for eCommerce and the other against and sabotaging the other.
In October ’11, BrandsMart USA posted the third revision of the site. This revision brought eCommerce and the buyers to have the ability to select featured products on the front page of the website and a cursor glossary of technological terms highlighted within the body of the page for instant definition.
With no major investment in the website, the MIS department had serious website reliability issues. From 2006 bringing the site in-house through most of ’14. Michael Perlman refused to fund any equipment or promotion, PPC or Google Ads of the BrandsMart USA website resulting in lowered expectations of volume. The reliability issues exploded due to limited funding and in ’12 Michael Perlman made another of his questionable hires.
Michael Perlman hired a VP of eCommerce, with no experience other than working for another competing retailer, who went out of business and a blog. From what I could find out, he had marketing experience utilizing that retailers systems, which he did not develop. No eCommerce of his own at all.
The executives in the MIS department were furious because the new VP compensation package. Later the CIO told me, it was two and a half times my compensation to do the same thing I had been doing for years.
In July ’11 Michael Perlman decided the BrandsMart USA website needed reviews and had another VP, Tom Freeman and another employee Joe Doyle negotiate a contract with a review company. At the time, as there are now, there were two major players in the review business and it was decided to go with the lower cost model. The negotiated rates were astronomical and when it came up for renewal in ’14, ex-employee was asked to assist in the negotiation and reduced the cost by close to 50%.
MIS prolonged the adoption, as another example of sabotaging the website business. Not having any reviews at the start, it was imperative to acquire as many reviews as possible. After the roll out of the review platform, had to fight to utilize a program called syndication, which gave BrandsMart USA the ability to display the reviews that were posted on vendor websites that participated in the program.
About ’13, I fought to participate in a $500 gift card giveaway every quarter that was conducted, funded and provided by the review platform company. In ’17 Michael Perlman clicked on the banner for the gift card giveaway and the link displayed a page with the rules provided by the review company. It was not branded with BrandsMart USA anywhere on the page and Michael Perlman, in another of his narcissistic decisions, had it removed from the site and reducing the review acquisition by almost 40%.
Worked diligently to expand the reviews to have the reviews duplicated on products that the only difference was color and to add reviews to packages. Neither was accomplished simply because the MIS department did not feel these tasks were a priority.
From the time the website was brought in-house, I advocated for having the site brought into W3C compliance, which would have drastically reduced the companies accessibility liability, but also using Google Analytics for metrics of the site.
Just before the new VP of eCommerce was hired, it was decided to move from the in-house .Net platform, to the Oracle platform for the BrandsMart USA website, as well as, host the site with Oracle.
Going from minimal or no major investment to millions of dollars for the Oracle software, third party integration programming and hosting.
Because of my involvement with just about all aspects of the website up until that time, a meeting was arranged for Oracle to question me on the functions, services and procedures of the website.
During this meeting, it was my first real interaction with the new VP of eCommerce, as the meeting started with a number of Oracle representatives and a few BrandsMart USA employees, Michael Perlman entered the conference room and stood directly behind the new VP. The Perlmans’ philosophy of the new hired are the experts proceed to boast how he was now getting metrics from the website. The new VP told him to add Google Analytics to the site, yes the analytics I had been advocating for since ’06!(ITYS06)
During this time I tried to convey how important mobile would be and responsive coding would be but the new expert did not share my thoughts on the subjects. With tablets starting to take off the responsive aspect made all more important.
Along with the data management, another of my responsibilities was the navigation of the site. Suggesting that the navigation should be moved from the side of the site to the top but was also shot down.
The navigation of the BrandsMart USA website is a puzzle based on product types which are divided by sub-types and assigned to a navigation category. With the vast amount of products BrandsMart USA carries, there are hundreds of sub-types that are assigned to the navigation.
Michael Perlman got upset because some brown noser believed that there were a lot of unassigned sub-types. Called a meeting that MIS do a report on the issue. Out of the hundreds of sub-types, only two were not assigned.
Those two were at one time not being used by the merchant / buyers and removed. The merchant / buyer then started using them again without notifying anyone resulting in them not being assigned.
In ’14 the new VP finally figured out that mobile was important and meeting was arranged. Bringing two issues to the table; first, a complete revision to the site to have responsive code written addressing to mobile issue but economically because the total cost to maintain just the single responsive website but a six figure cost and additional time to convert the website. Second, having an independent “mobile” site at an estimated $50k and short turnaround. Conveying having two sites would double the advertising departments graphical work, resulting in additional employees to cover the workload.
Michael Perlman ended the meeting with, he would think about it. The new VP convinced him for the less expensive, shorter completion.
The advertising department had to bring on additional employees to meet the graphics demand.
After the mobile site was released responsive became the focus and in ’16 select pages were rewritten in responsive code.
The November ’16 revision allowed more promotional positions on the home page of the BrandsMart USA website.
Finally after close to three years and after bringing up the responsive(ITYS07) coding, in November of ’17 the BrandsMart USA was revised to being fully responsive.
To this day the BrandsMart USA website continues fail in some form the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and not 100% in compliance. Example; multiple image product pages use the same alt tag description and no long description to help blind disabled visitors understand what a image contains.
As one of my frustrations having advocated for years to be totally in compliance, Michael Perlman chose to pay off the litigation brought against the BrandsMart USA website instead of investing and directing his staff to have the site in compliance.
Corporate Address:
3200 SW 42nd Street
Hollywood, FL 33312
Corporate Phone Number:
954-797-4000
Toll Free:
800-432-8579
Once, if a business, business owner did something an employee or member of the public didn’t like or disagreed with, they had little recourse besides protesting in person or to their local Better Business Bureau. Now, with the avenue of the Internet, the average person can easily voice their concerns and open a dialog to come to a compromise and/or lead to a resolution. If that opportunity by the business or business owner neglects to respond, it is up to any of those individuals to voice their response.
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