« Marketing music through war-time mayhem | Main | Inside Google: Read the footnotes »

Gap.com shoppers held hostage: Day No. 19 We’ve been checking the Gap site periodically, to see if the online store has reopened, and we can now report that we are now in at least day no. 19 of the site shutdown (we first noticed it on Aug. 29, and don’t know how long it was down before that). Referring back to Gap Inc.’s most recent 10Q, which reported $40 million in sales on the site in the “thirteen weeks ended July 30, 2005,” we did a quick calculation. The site was doing on average $439,560 per day in sales prior to the shutdown. Multiply that by the 19 days the site’s been inoperative, and that would mean the site has lost at least $8.3 million in sales so far. Not a huge amount, but what would seem more troubling is that the closed site has no doubt sent some Gap customers to competitors—possibly over the long term. Like some people that commented to this post, one time when we stopped by this week we were offered a chance to check out the site. Not having any urgent apparel business to transact, we instead spent our time there taking Gap up on its offer to email us a link to a director’s cut of the current ad campaign, which we hoped to share with all of you. Though it’s always possible we never received the link because we typed our email address in wrong or something, all we know is it never showed up in our in-box. —Posted by Catharine P. Taylor

September 16, 2005 | Permalink

Comments

And there are typing errors on the "preview site"... geez, this is saaaadddd

Posted by: Edw3rd | Sep 16, 2005 12:49:46 PM

is this news? who gives a fu*k about the god damn gap site?

Posted by: bud | Sep 16, 2005 7:30:52 PM

the new site is up! while they don't apologize for their absence they clearly indicate what's new, what's improved and what's coming soon. that's pretty cool.

Posted by: shoeshiny | Sep 20, 2005 1:16:37 PM

I just tried it and I'm still getting the notation that it's a preview. anyone care to try it and see what they get? thx.

Posted by: Catharine P. Taylor | Sep 20, 2005 3:26:10 PM

the gap.com site is a preview site. there is a pop-up indicator after the home page loads that explains this.

Posted by: itsyouitsme | Sep 20, 2005 7:57:04 PM

i got that preview button, too. but i was able to purchase stuff off the site so it is fullly functioning. guess maybe they're still tweaking stuff. anyway, i like the improvements they made and the shopping process was much easier.

Posted by: shoeshiny | Sep 21, 2005 10:32:49 AM

there's an article about it here:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/09/13/business/ecom.php

can you tell I'm obsessed with the gap?

Posted by: shoeshiny | Sep 21, 2005 11:25:16 AM

I used the "new" site and it's completely broken on Safari for the Mac.

I also used the "preview" site, which was less broken, but still broken.

I find it utterly ridiculous that a company this size can't manage to use a development space to Q&A their new site *while leaving the old one in place*.

They need to fire some people. Seriously.

Posted by: Nicole | Oct 5, 2005 9:04:41 AM

Post a comment

Name:

URL:

Remember personal info?

Comments:

The opinions expressed in comments are those of the individual poster. They do not necessarily reflect the views of Adweek or Nielsen Business Media. Comments of a promotional nature or comments that are otherwise inappropriate may be removed.