Safari Unable to Browse GAP Inc. Web Sites

I notice this evening (October 28) that both gap.com and bananarepublic.com are once again under reconstruction.

Perhaps enough Mac users (and perhaps one named Steve) have reacted angrily to GAP Inc.'s decision to shut out Safari users that GAP Inc. is now in a scramble to rectify the situation.

Well, that's my wish anyway. 🙂 We shall see.

Mark

If it should interest anyone, I have written to the customer service department at GAP Inc. to register my complaint. Below is the text of my complaint:

To the GAP Customer Service Department Head:

I am a regular GAP and Banana Republic customer and have enjoyed my shopping experiences on- and off-line. I am also a Macintosh computer user who uses the W3C Web standards compliant browser, Safari. Recently, GAP Inc. has redesigned its Web sites and the designers of those Web sites have knowingly incorporated non-standard technology that blocks GAP Inc. customers who are Mac users browsing with the Safari browser from accessing the GAP Inc. on-line stores. I'm not happy about this development, and I find this technological block to be extremely off-putting and unnecessary.

I would like to suggest very strongly that GAP Inc. move quickly to reverse this technological block of customers and potential customers who happen to be Mac Safari users. Turning customers away by technological means (or any other means) does not reflects well on the GAP Inc. brands and make poor business sense. Proprietary technology, however cool, is not so cool when it excludes customers.

Are you already aware of the issue I've raised? Will you be able to raise my concerns with the relevant executives within the corporation? I hope so, and I hope to be able to shop the on-line GAP and Banana Republic stores with Safari in the very near future.

Sincerely,
Mark Oehlschlager

Gary,

Thank you for the link to the related thread. I will need to use Firefox to lodge my complaint. Come to think of it, I'll back that up with a phone call.

By the way, the Gap and Banana Republic sites are back to their old ways; so, the hopes I expressed in my earlier post were unfounded.

Mark

...some mixed results to report: 1) I see a message on the Banana Republic site that indicates efforts are now underway to make the site work with Safari (good news) and 2) I receive a less than satisfactory boilerplate statement from GAP customer service in response to my complaint.

The GAP reply is below.

Mark

Dear Mr. Oehlschlager,

Thank you for your e-mail. We apologize for the difficulties you
experienced on our site. Currently we support AOL, Netscape Navigator,
Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Firefox for PC users. Unfortunately,
we temporarily do not support Microsoft Internet Explorer for Macintosh.
Our developers are aware of this issue and hope to have this resolved
soon.

If you continue to experience problems with any of the browsers that we
support, please check your browser settings to confirm that they meet
our requirements. For Mac users having difficulties using Safari, you
can download Firefox for free at www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

If we may be of further assistance, please contact us via e-mail at
custserv@gap.com or by calling 1-800-GAP-STYLE. Our Customer Service
Consultants are available 24 hours a day for your convenience.

Sincerely,

H••••••n
Customer Service Consultant