GAP.COM AND OLDNAVY.COM CLOSE FOR UPGRADE
BUT LOYAL SHOPPERS SUPPORT A QUICK RECOVERY
Closings spark consumer curiosity and buzz, search behavior data suggest
NEW YORK, Sept. 22, 2005— Gap Inc. shocked the retail community this summer by closing the Old Navy (www.oldnavy.com), Gap (www.gap.com), and Banana Republic (www.bananarepublic.com) online stores for several days for complete site and system overhauls. Despite this unusual decision to close down their entire online storefronts, shopping traffic has since recovered.
According to Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, Old Navy and Gap, while losing visits during the period of the site overhauls, experienced growth in their market share of visits once the sites re-launched. The sites saw increases of 5% and 13% respectively when comparing the first full week the sites were back online (week ending September 10, 2005) to the last week before the site closings (week ending August 20, 2005).
"The lengthy closures for Gap's online stores provides a unique opportunity to examine how consumer behavior changes when top sites within an industry segment are inaccessible," said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise. "In this case, Gap's online stores experienced both an incremental lift in visits after the stores reopened as well as increased search on their brands during the site closure."
Shut-down drives curiosity
Stymied shoppers turned to search engines for answers while the site was down - searches for "old navy" and "gap" increased by 69% and 88%, respectively, for the week ending September 3, 2005, versus the week before the stores went offline (week ending August 20, 2005). Interestingly, the share of searches for "old navy" and "gap" during the down-time was greater than the share of searches for those terms during the peak of the holiday season in December 2004.
"Search term data provides unprecedented insight into how key events impact online and offline brands," said Bill Tancer. "While it is counter-intuitive that the market share of visits to Gap and Old Navy online stores would increase after lengthy closure, this data, in conjunction with the search term data, demonstrates the strength of the two brands and points to firm loyalty of their customers."
Contact: For media inquiries or to schedule an analyst interview, please contact Lizzie Babarczy: press@hitwise.com (212) 380 2910.
About Hitwise:
Hitwise is the world's leading online competitive intelligence service. Each day, Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 websites across 160 industry categories.
By monitoring more people, more websites, more often, Hitwise provides marketers with timely and actionable marketing insights on how their online presence compares to competitive websites. Companies use this information to maximize the return on their online investment, in efforts such as search marketing, affiliate programs, online advertising, visitor segmentation, content development and lead generation.
Hitwise collects Internet usage information via a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in mega panels, and complies with local and international privacy legislation as audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Founded in 1997, Hitwise is a privately held company, headquartered in New York City and operates in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore.
More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com
