A major systems upgrade still has Gap struggling with performance gaps

Gap Inc. has all three of its overhauled e-commerce sites back in action, but still only on a limited basis. On Aug.24 Gap took down three e-commerce sites—Gap.com, Old Navy.com and BananaRepublic.com—to implement a major platform upgrade and web site redesign.

But over the next month Gap experienced major downtime in bringing the sites back online, which cost the multi-channel retailer millions of dollars in potential web sales and countless customer service headaches. Today all three sites are back up and running - but only to a limited number of web users. “All three sites are back online, but we are throttling the traffic on Gap and Old Navy,” a Gap spokeswoman says. “This means that we are letting a set number of customers onto each of the web sites. This will help us gain valuable learning while providing a solid and improving experience over the interim. I don`t have an exact day when we think we`ll be there 100%.”

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Gap, No. 22 in the Internet Retailer Top 400 Guide to Retail Web Sites, says the site redesign project is taking a long time to implement because of the complexity involved. “It is a complete soup-to-nuts overhaul,” the spokeswoman says. “Everything from every application to the entire network infrastructure has been redesigned and rebuilt to improve the online shopping experience.”

Gap is making specific upgrades to a variety of programs and applications, including product content management, marketing content management, promotions and pricing management, personalization, the core e-commerce platform, order management, inventory management, customer contact, fraud prevention and analytics, the spokeswoman says. All of the work is being done internally.

“If you are just changing a web site interface, it`s possible to have two parallel sites running,” she says. “But when you have more than 10 other systems to change out as well, it’s really hard and expensive. Running parallel sites would have required wasted expenditures.”