In my previous two jobs I worked closely with two successful e-commerce sites at TWA and US Airways. When you work with an "always open" site on which customers can shop and purchase at any time of day, you become very sensitive to site outages. For every minute the US Airways site was down, we lost a revenue figure that would make anyone swallow pretty hard. When we would have to do a site upgrade that required an outage, it was always done in an overnight implementation so that the least number of customers are affected and if it couldn't be completed, tested and signed off before 5am, we rolled it back so that we could have a site back up for customers by 6am.

This is pretty basic stuff. That's why what Gap, Inc. has done to its customers is so asanine. Gap, Inc owns The Gap, Banana Republic, and Old Navy, and in order to provide customers with a "better shopping experience," they took all three sites down at the same time to do upgrades last Wednesday. A full week later, two are still down and the Banana Republic site is intermitently working.

I remember being shocked last week when Emily told me that the sites had been down for a full day, and now I check the sites every day just to be a witness to what must be a full blown snafu at Gap headquarters.

I'm all for upgrades to web sites. I always thought the Banana Republic site was sub-par for its brand image. They tried their best to make it look nice, but its functionality was just awful. I particularly hated that when I would look for items in their "sale" area, more often than not, I would click on my size in something and they would show a really large and red error message saying that the item had just sold out and to pick another item. It drove me crazy that the display made me think they had what I wanted only to pull the rug out from under me on the next screen.

When I saw they were doing upgrades, I thought, "Great, maybe they'll have real-time inventory and I won't have to see the big, obnoxious error message." So, I checked the site out (at one of the time periods that it wasn't down) and went to the "sale" area. My first try at picking something got me this...

And not only did they not actually fix my biggest pet peeve about the site, as an added bonus, the grammar is at about a 2nd grade level.

Now, my theory is that they put in their "upgrades" and probably did something like a database conversion that they couldn't roll back. They released the sites and as traffic started to hit them the first morning, they all crashed when the new structure couldn't handle all of the people. And, now, since they can't back it out, they are sitting there and have no idea what to do or when the sites will be back up.

Good job, Gap! I'll be checking in occasionally for my daily chuckle!

Update: Whoa! In the amount of time that I wrote this, Old Navy is back up. I put it at even odds that it'll be back down again by mid morning tomorrow.

From the Peanut Gallery...

5 Replies | Add Your Own