Even if you don’t own a pair of khakis for every occasion (minivan repair! soccer games! day trips to Linens-n-Things!), chances are you’ve heard about Gap.com and OldNavy.com being closed for repairs for the past few weeks.

An article in the New York Times attempts to explain the method behind the madness of closing two popular shopping sites during the back-to-school shopping season, citing analysts who say that the changes made to the two sites will more than make up for the millions of dollars of lost business.

According to the article, the changes were much more than skin deep. Gap bucked the industry trend of using an outside firm and custom-built its own software as part of a major overhaul of back-end systems that track inventory and promotions. Doing so meant a seamless transition would have been nearly impossible.

Gap isn’t disclosing the cost of the project, but the analyst estimates are in the neighborhood of $10 million.

Mike at Techdirt says it wasn’t worth it. Neither site is live right now but we’ll let you know whether we agree ASAP.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2005 at 3:17 pm and is filed under ECommerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.