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Saturday, June 14, 2008

An example of an E-Commerce success and its causes--GAP.COM

“This is about being clicks and mortar – letting customers access the Gap brands, whether in the store or online”
– Ron Beegle, E-VP, Gap Inc.Direct

Link: www.gap.com

Being the first bricks-and-mortar retailers to venture online, today, Gap Incorporation is one of the world’s largest specialty retailers. Out of US$15.8 billion revenue in year 2007, US$903 million was contributed through e-commerce.


Company Background

In 1969, Don Fisher and his wife Doris opened the first GAP store in San Francisco. The company took name from “generation gap”. Within a year, GAP reached $2 million sale. Stayed ahead of industry trends, Gap began to develop its online strategy. An online store was introduced in 1998 at www.gap.com, GapKids and BabyGap went online, followed, in1999 by BananaRepublic.com and oldnavy.com.


Causes of success

Gap was in retail industry for around 40 years. People trusted the brand. Customers already knew products, sizes and styles. This relieves the fear of buying clothes online. Secondly, company was spread all over the world which made online customers reachable by offline stores. Customers can return online products that did not fit to any Gap store whereas pure-plays customers had to mail back products. Company saved 49.9% of total costs for a Bricks-and-Mortar department stall.

Assessment of Typical Expenses of a Bricks-and-Mortar Department Store

3 comments:

Kai Wah said...

The font types used in the post are not consistent where half way of a paragraph, the font changed to another type. Take note of this.

happy~ said...

haha. Ok... but sometimes type in words and paste it to blogger, the alignment, font types, font size and other features will change... maybe i still not familiar with blogger... Anyway, thanks fr your remind^^

Clipping Path said...

I'm personally a big fan of Eproject~ eCommerce blog
blog. Thanks for sharing this post.