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Surprises

by Mike Masnick

Thu, Sep 15th 2005 5:41pm





Gap Insists: No We Really Don't Want You To Shop Yet

from the excuses-getting-weaker dept

It's getting more and more difficult to figure out what's going on with The Gap and its various websites. Beyond the surprise that the Gap couldn't afford any extra servers to build the new site while keeping the old one online, we were then told that the new site would be so spectacular that it would all be okay. So far, the early reviews haven't seen the spectacularness promised. However, the Gap continues to try to spin this story. The latest report is that the various stores still aren't fully working, but the Gap says this is on purpose because they want to throttle the traffic so they can "closely monitor the site and study traffic." That doesn't make any sense at all. Why would you need to "throttle traffic" in order to monitor traffic? It certainly sounds a lot more like the new site just can't handle the traffic. So, now, we have a site that was offline for weeks, isn't that special now that it's (partially) back and can't handle normal traffic. Sounds like a great move.

5 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    Sending resumes?

    identicon
    TJ, Sep 15th, 2005 @ 6:56pm

    It sounds like a good time for skilled IT professionals interested in a change to send their resume to The Gap. They clearly need some help badly. On second thought, they seem so mismanaged that it is probably a miserable place to work. It would be nice though to be able to take a production e-commerce system down for weeks and have management say it was a good thing.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    No Subject Given

    identicon
    J Surdilla, Sep 16th, 2005 @ 6:00am

    You have established a good point overall except that you missed one major factor: the season that drives GAP sales.

    I am not sure about the exact figure but from what I remember, 50-70% of GAP's total annual sale is from the winter season. That leaves the remaining 30-50% profit divided throughout the rest of the year, which isn't really evenly divided--most of the remaining percentage will be out of pre and during summer season. By the time the GAP took down its site, summer season is ending.

    Now, whether it was more expensive to buy and set up a new server or lose thousands of dollars in sale, who knows? Only they do.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    Re: No Subject Given

    icon
    W Klink (profile), Sep 16th, 2005 @ 8:36am

    > By the time the GAP took down its site, summer season is ending.< br>
    And "Back to School" was in full swing...

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  4.  

    Classic Excuses

    identicon
    Pete Austin, Sep 16th, 2005 @ 9:32am

    Next time you're faced with a Website that keeps crashing and you are desperately analyzing the logs to try and work out what's going wrong, you know what to announce: "The traffic is being temporarily throttled on the [your domain] site so that the company can closely monitor the site and study traffic, a company representative said."

    Guys, screw the cost, lease more servers and reinstall the old version. You probably won't need it, but the peak sales period for a lot of business is Thanksgiving and that's too close.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  5.  

    Sounds like...

    identicon
    fuzzmanmatt, Sep 16th, 2005 @ 4:03pm

    Sounds like what Spymac is doing! Promised up and running september 1, still isn't functional. Hooray!

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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