I know that writing about this might be at the expense of possibly ever getting business from the Gap but here goes.
At the end of this summer the Gap did a crazy thing, they took down all 3 of their sites (Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic) to do a website upgrade. Normal? Yes. But here's the kicker, Banana Republic was down for 2 days, and Gap and Old Navy were down 2 weeks smack in the middle of back to school!!! In September they were throttling customers visiting their sites because they couldn't handle the traffic and a spokeswoman said "This will help us gain valuable learnings while providing a solid and improving experience of the interim."
Are you clutching your pearls? Because I did. So I asked our Technical Director Nick, is there any technical reason why this would need to happen? "Yes" he uttered to me over IM. "Lack of electricity to power the servers, lack of Internet connectivity or death of all of their technical people at once." That's what i figured.
Internet Retailer wrote an article about it in this month's publication featuring a spokeswoman said that "running parallel sites is hard and expensive". My gut tells me not $20 million worth.
I felt i should write about it because:
1. VR has many customers who are retailers who shouldn't think this is the norm.
2. If you can manage it, working on a total new site should happen in conjunction with running your old one. At some point a switchover happens so you don't lose revenue, more importantly aggravate customers.
3. Timing is important - At most a few days is acceptable and preferably in your slow time.
4. I went to buy something and got aggravated.
Gap took a serious risk so good thing they have some serious loyal customers (like me) and a $10 million revenue hit per week doesn't kill their company. But something this important could damage yours so beware.
Comments