Bizarrely, Gap, Inc temporarily closed down three of its online stores this week (Gap, Old Navy, and Banana Republic) while they upgrade and enhance online operations to prepare for the holiday shopping season. Banana Republic, the only one of the three to reopen, is a company that is striving to enhance their ecommerce experience and is doing an excellent job at communicating their new features and tools to their users:
Banana Republic is rolling out a clear communication plan to announce site enhancements:
- new features and tools are featured right on their home page
- a section is dedicated to new site enhancements which clearly explain the purpose of each new tool
The actual enhancements are also great. Some of the best are:
- Quicklook – allows users to shop without leaving the category pages by rolling rollover any product. Behaves like Flash, but it’s AJAX.
- Inline Shopping Bag – displays the shopping bag contents as a quick confirmation of what a user adds to their bag (this functionality would be even better if you could re-open this "inline shopping bag" at any time to check your contents)
- The "What makes a product great" feature – For some of their products, such as dress shirts, they feature a step-by-step tutorial in the product overview about what makes the product great and unique (quality, craftmanship, cuffs, etc.
We are curious to see what the Gap and Old Navy will offer when they reopen. They are promising a more compelling experience. I hope it was worth shutting down the site for days, frustrating customers, and losing millions in sales. Surely there are ways to update sites without experiencing any downtime.
Posted by Martin Cis
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It is incredible that they would take their site down to do this. OK if you are refurbishing a store you have to close down to redesign and refit the store but a web site???
Gap.com’s new, innovative QuickLook widgets
This is a deep-but-narrow look at Gap.com’s new QuickLook widgets*. I feel it brings “faceted navigation” (a.k.a. faceted browse, guided navigation, guided browse) to a whole new level for e-commerce clothing shopping and sets a raft of best-practices …
Manage the Experience Gap During Downtime
Set expectations.
If you have been following Internet news lately or you’ve tried to visit Gap.com, Oldnavy.com, or BananaRepublic.com to make a purchase, you probably already know all three sites were down periodically during the last few weeks to prepare for the upcoming holiday season.
The sites were taken down on August 24 — at the height of a back-to-school shopping season with the highest gasoline prices in recent memory. At my company, we noticed and started a lively internal dialogue. We addressed obvious issues about lost revenue but were more interested in the way the three brands communicated the outage with their customers. We found two messages, “Under Construction” and “Store Closed,” posted in the place of Gap.com during the transition. Both were straightforward messages but not nearly as hip or friendly as the Gap brand itself.
Customer Reaction
After two weeks of downtime, in an era of server reliability and high customer expectations around “always open” Internet shopping, most customers probably visited multiple times. Reactions most likely ranged from a shrug to frustration. Some might have decided to visit the physical stores or another online destination.
A customer quote in a “San Francisco Chronicle” article underscores the point: “‘I just felt stymied,’ said the 33-year-old Storch, who is shopping for more items on the Internet while on maternity leave with her one-month-old son. ‘I thought most Web sites only shut down during the middle of the night.’”
The incident puzzled us as well. The Gap is well known for smart, innovative marketing and is a top-of-mind leader in the online retail space. Was it experimenting with a new way to generate buzz about its site enhancements? Did it think the downtime would pass under the industry — or customer — radar?
Maintain a Customer Relationship When You’re Down
We all struggle with planned and unplanned site outages. Thankfully, most customers understand sites can go down periodically for maintenance and enhancements. A few thoughts for when you must take a site down:
If you’re down, let people know when they can come back to shop. Think of it like this: instead of finding a neighborhood store mysteriously closed during business hours, you’re thankful to see a sign on the door that says, “Gone to lunch. Back at 12:30 p.m.”
Stick to your timeline.
When you say your site will be back up by 9 a.m. on Tuesday, it had better be back up by then. Otherwise, you risk eroding customers’ trust in your brand.
Offer a peek into the improved site experience.
We often encourage clients to create a brief demo area on the current site to give customers a taste of the coming improvements. The brand communicates that enhancements are coming without jeopardizing the current site experience or losing revenue.
Warn customers.
If a road will be closed for construction, signs are often up at least a few days before, warning drivers. Extend this courtesy to the online space. A simple e-mail or notice on your site keeping customers informed will be appreciated.
Reward customers for their patience.
If a site is down unexpectedly or for an extended period, reward customers for their patience and loyalty with discounts.
Provide an abbreviated catalog.
Provide a small subset of your best-selling items to customers during the transition phase. Even if you can’t make your full product line available, customers will appreciate the option and your consideration of their needs.
In a perfect world, sites would never go down. But that world doesn’t exist. Make the transition between sites as seamless as possible, and turn a potentially frustrating experience into a positive one for customers.
Two things probably prompted their rationale to take the site down:
- shift to AJAX functionality
- shift to XHTML/CSS website layouts
Not that it makes it ok. Ameritrade.com had simultaneous websites running for months until they finally cut over to their redesigned trading site.
An iterative approach could have been used to roll out certain features for the website, albeit it would’ve taken longer to roll out. Yahoo and Amazon are constantly upgrading and testing areas of their sites, gathering feedback along the way, but never pulling the plug completely.
Surprisingly, the Gap shutdown may have been fueled by *both* marketing and IT. First, marketing wanting to get the slick interface out and the IT guys eager to finally get some clean XHTML code posted along with some buzzworthy AJAX development.
What was needed was a mandate from “above” that the site(s) should remain open during renovations. That may have stifled some enthusiasm initially, but at least reaffirmed the websites’ focus on ROI to the team members.
AJAX shopping cart at the GAP
This NYT article NYT article describes the new AJAX-driven GAP shopping experience (deployment of which apparantly required shutting down gap.com for THREE WEEKS!) More blog coverage here, here and here. AJAX debuting on the shopping cart actually make…