Yesterday I wandered up to the Oxford Street branch of Gap, the clothes shop anarchists love to hate. The reason was that I had received one of those emailed discount vouchers that have become almost ubiquitous since Hugh McLeod added £15 million to Thresher’s balance sheet by posting a 40% off coupon.

Having fallen victim to the strange psychology of the discount (because I was ’saving’ money I ended up spending much more than I would have done otherwise), this morning I decided that I quite fancied picking up a few more things. I’d seen a rather nice blazer which I quite fancied but, before braving the 8th level of hell which is Oxford Street on a weekday lunchtime, wanted to check whether they had any woollen trousers to go with it (the release of the film means that Brideshead Revisited is going to be so on-season this winter).

However when I wanted to check Gap’s UK website I hit a brick wall. Googling Gap brings up the US site, whilst setting the search to UK only returns a whole host of interesting results, none of which look like they sell leather jackets and chinos. Thinking that maybe I’d missed something, I returned to Gap.com, assuming that it would actually be an international site. But all the prices are in dollars and there seems to be no way of finding stores, or clothes available, in countries outside of the US.

Finally, I sent an email round the office to see whether I was just being incredibly dense, but it seems that my colleagues are just as mystified by Gap’s decision not to have international sites. Responses to my question “Do Gap have a UK site?” included:

I don’t think they do, I remember a while back that you can’t find out the opening times of uk stores on their website, haven’t used it since.

I noticed this a while ago when I was trying to find a store – it seems absolutely crazy!

I tried to find one for my wife before, and couldn’t believe they don’t. Seem to remember they have a UK recruitment site but nothing for clothes — and we couldn’t find the stuff we were looking for on gap.com, so it appears not to have UK stock on it either. Amazing.

As a believer in the power of social media, I decided to stop looking when several people sent me this page from Yahoo! Answers.

We often work with clients to help them get around the problems that can arise when a brand wishes to provide local content to specific geographic locations: solutions can involve using local domains (cc TLD), hosting the site in the country being targeted, using local languages, even ensuring that local contact details are on every page. Simply not having sites for countries outside the US is, to put it mildly, an interesting way of dealing with the problem.
When you consider that there are, according to Google, there are more than 340,000 searches every month for terms relating to Gap, it seems bizarre to say the least that they haven’t thought of having a website that can answer the questions these searches represent.

One suggestion as to why they may not have any sites outside the US is that they don’t ship goods overseas. Leaving aside the fact that this seems like a huge missed opportunity, why not just have a site offering details of the latest ranges and a store locator? After all, with Zara stealing Gap’s crown as the world’s largest fashion retailer, I would have thought that anything which might offer a way to steal back some market share would be worth trying out.

I was hoping to speak to someone from Gap to find out if there is actually a reason for the lack of a British site but, as there’s no site I can find with UK contact details*, I wasn’t able to call them. I guess I’ll be heading up to Oxford Street again this lunchtime after all.

UPDATE: As if to prove that great minds really do think alike (or that fools never differ), Graham at e-consultancy has just published a post on this very subject, examining some of the dangers of offline retailers not offering online stores.

*If anyone from Gap reads this and would like to leave a comment, we’d love to hear from you – drop us a line here.

Header image: nutmeg on flickr

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