Bad Marketing 101 by Professor Gap
Monday, September 19th, 2005 by Mike Rundle
Business 2.0 reminded me that Gap.com has been down for the entire month of September, something I knew about a few weeks back, but never guessed it would be down this long.
With back-to-school shopping and the recent XHTML relaunch of BananaRepublic.com (which doesn’t work in Safari) you would think that traffic to the brother site Gap.com might be sparked a bit, but Gap shows they don’t care by not having an online store up for an entire month. And, no, it’s not a technical issue, it’s a bravado issue.
Gap is building hype and leading customers on, and not in a good way. Screw you Gap, I’m not shopping at your online store now, or in the future when the awe-inspiring Gap.com goes live. Where’s SwichTower for enterprise-class e-commerce stores when you need it?
Gap.com is selecting some (lucky?) users to check out the new site. Doesn’t seem much different to me.
Great review of the new Gap.com — check it out.
Reader Comments
15 Responses to “Bad Marketing 101 by Professor Gap”
Interestingly enough, I clicked on through and was prompted with a message that I was selected to “test” the new site. I guess it’s not down totally. Upon going around the site a little. It’s decent, but not really anything to hype up too much. They have it set up xhtml strict, but it’s got plenty of simple errors.
I was hoping to find a little write up on what exactly they updated since I’ve only been to the site maybe two times in the last ten years. We’ll see what happens when it goes live.
September 19th, 2005 at 10:33 am
Had no idea about this, but I just visited and a got a little dhtml pop-up telling me I’m one of the selected customers to try out the new gap.com. XHTML strict and some interesting little ajax shopping cart widgets here and there.
September 19th, 2005 at 10:34 am
Wouldn’t you know that right after we posted this, we started getting those little preview invitations as well.
Go figure :)
September 19th, 2005 at 10:36 am
After reading this I decided to check out how badly BR.com displays in Safari. It’s pretty bad. You’d think a company of that size would test their brand new, kick ass website in at least all the major browsers for both platforms.
I also went to gap.com and was treated with an interesting popup (DHTML/JS as opposed to the traditional popup) that told me I was one of the limited few choosen to check out the new store. Again I was disappointed. It seems that they are just re-skinning the BR store and selling it as brand new innovation, problems and all.
Here’s to bravado and poor testing, may you die a rapid death — even on large websites.
September 19th, 2005 at 11:09 am
Come on man… you have so much style as a designer… you should also dress with style… why are you shopping at the gap in the first place? ;)
September 19th, 2005 at 12:01 pm
Well their sweaters make really nice handkerchiefs…
;)
September 19th, 2005 at 12:04 pm
I just shrunk my gap sweater! speaking of gap sweaters.. its definately a small now, I should have known that “air dry ONLY” was there for a reason :/.. as for the gap site, I guess I’m a lucky user too w00t! .. I don’t see anything different ? oh well.. I’ll still shop at GAP, Not on online thats just silly ! I don’t want to have to wait forever to find out that something doesn’t fit right or doesn’t match something that I wanted to wear it with, only to have to return it.. I wonder how many people buy clothes online..
September 19th, 2005 at 12:36 pm
Yeah, well apparently the guy making the decisions once owned eToys.com and when offered to be baught out by Amazon and Toys R Us, said “I’m gonna bring them down.” So… lets just say that the decision making at the top ain’t all too solid.
And for your reading pleasure, I did a tiny review of the site when I was “let in” a while back.
September 19th, 2005 at 1:14 pm
This doesn’t surprise me at all. I used to work for Banana Republic, and Gap Inc. has always considered their web presence an afterthought, which baffles me. They go to the trouble of unveiling new products there but can’t make the sites accessible for everyone, or even encourage people to go to their websites in the first place. That sounds pretty backwards to me.
September 19th, 2005 at 4:42 pm
I got the same thing, I accessed the site in the beginning of the week, and it said
“Thank You for Visiting the New Gap.com
We’re updating our site with innovative new features to bring you an extraordinary shopping experience.
We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you.
Please check back soon.” Then later on in the week I got the same message (you are one of the few people allowed to preview…)
Same thing happened earlier in the week with the Old Navy website, but it has been upgraded now.
September 19th, 2005 at 9:46 pm
BananaRepublic.com doesn’t work in Opera either… gets stuck in some endless loop where the page loads, then loads again, and again, and again, etc. And the URL it’s stuck on is “http://www.bananarepublic.com/updateBrowser.do” - so apparently I should update my browser? Sorry, that’s retarded.
September 20th, 2005 at 9:23 am
I got to see the new site by visiting GapInc.com, the corporate site, and then clicking on a link to Gap.com… They may be allowing access to people that come from the corporate site, but not directly to the Gap.com URL.
September 20th, 2005 at 9:44 am
Man, have they ever heard of whitespace management? Geez. Tons of white space gaps in their source code.
I know many people don’t like Coldfusion (I personally do), but at least it has a whitespace management function that automatically removes any whitespace in code generated by the server or whatever.
September 20th, 2005 at 11:51 am
SimpleWeb comments in passing that the site is unusable without javascript (and you are forcibly warned).
One is also barred from the site unless they accept cookies. I’ve seen this trend growing, and don’t understand why so many sites make this a requirement. Filling a shopping cart or logging into an account, of course - but just to browse the catalog?
Similarly, You can’t browse the Staples.com catalog without providing a zip code. While neither are serious burdens, why have them at all? For people like me, who dissallow permanent cookies by default (but not session cookies), it’s a bad customer experience from the outset: I feel watched.
September 22nd, 2005 at 4:18 pm
Their site being down has been anoying since a friend of mine had gap banners all over his site and his packages looked liked it was hit by a hurricane having all those blank spaces.
Anyway probably they don’t want to turn majority of their customers into web buyers but still want to drive their customers directly to the store. Or probably they wanted to test the strength of their brand on how much of the web buyers are willing to push themselves to go to their store. Looking at their position and annual revenue I would not be surprise if they see things differently done commoners would.
October 3rd, 2005 at 10:24 am
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