But my gf at the time thought it was brilliant. What I learned was that a lot of women's shoes are purchased based on anything except comfort. The quality can be shoddy, the wear can cause excruciating pain, yet some top brands sell for hundreds and even thousands a pair. Swing by the Nordstrom's women's shoe dept sometime and take a look at the quality of build. Eavesdrop a bit and take inventory of the questions the clients ask about. (Zappos is started by a bunch of ex-Nordy folks).
To this day I've only purchased 1 pair of shoes on Zappos, and that's after I had bought it previously at the dept store (New Balance 993, imo best shoes for walking/running in case you're wondering).
It's interesting how two different markets have developed (men's shoes and women's shoes) that have such different parameters. Men's shoes have outstanding build quality --- to the point where a good pair of quality shoes gets resoled multiple times. Do women ever resole shoes?
A fashioner designer once told me he made the men's clothing first, then crafted the women's clothing out of its leftovers + some embellishments.
Womens shoes exclusively seem capable on only lasting 6 months of regular wear. Everything from straps, buckles, soles and innersoles seem to fall apart.
The ultimate insult in all this is that they always cost more than the equivalent male version. The only exceptions to this are where the two items are equivalent (ie mens/womens levis, mens/womens running shoes).
I don't like buying clothes unless they're made from natural fibres/materials. It's cotton, wool + leather for me. For a woman, it's virtually impossible to stick to a rule like this.
I guess it's all about the fashion and style, and they aren't expected to last due to the built-in obsolescence of womens fashion.
Women's clothing is also cheaper at the lower end, and much more expensive at the higher end for the same reason.
.. so women tell me anyway, I can (surprise surprise) male.
Men's fashions change much more slowly, and within much narrower parameters. It actually makes sense to spend a few grand on a suit that you're going to wear to work every week for a couple years, and it has to be pretty well made to last that long.
The hipster doofus stuff is as shoddy as women's wear and for the same reasons.
Most girls I know don't have that criteria. The first and foremost criteria for them is they must fashionable, good looking, must match with their dress etc. Given this use case, there is only so much you can do for things like durability and ruggedness. Because you need to make them colorful, with some deigns etc.
Ultimately you get what you ask for.
We only need comfort testing, but I think the flip-side would be that womens shoes would cost upward of $200-$300 equivalent. I don't know if there's a market for that.
This doesn't apply just to shoes, btw. There is a broad luxury market for almost anything. Don't believe me? Visit a western wear store sometime.
Similarly, there are plenty of high quality women's shoes.
I'd probably agree that more men buy high quality shoes. In my experience men on average tend to put less emphasis on style over function, and so that does inevitably lead to functional (well made) shoes.
I bought four pairs of shoes in what seemed like the best size and width for me (there is good information about brand size trends on their site), got them the next day and tried them on, decided on the Izumis and sent the others back with the UPS shipping tag they gave me.
I understand things are different now, but that was an excellent buying experience. I've never bought running shoes from a local store since.
I've never found Zappos to have particularly good selection of the shoes I buy (men's dress shoes, boots of various kinds, etc). They're particularly bad for boots. Their main focus seems low to mid range female shoes.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are certain types or models of footwear that are completely off-limits due to their business model.
We both like taking walks or bicycle rides together. I ask her for advice about shoes for both purposes.
P.S. When I lived in Seattle in the very early 1990s, I was told that Nordstrom's was known as "Rent-a-Shoe," because the generous return policy at that department store meant that a woman could buy a pair of shoes to attend a fashionable party, wear the shoes just once, and then return them without hassle to the store. I don't know what current policies are at Nordstrom's, but it does seem that fashionable shoes for occasional use have long been a mainstay of the store's business.
To each is his own, but the runner in me can't help but think "Those poor feet..." :(
I still have to try them on so in order to judge all that.
As far as Amazon's same-day delivery is concerned, i guess it is as much warehouse / picking speed and efficiency as it is to have the right transportation partner. In germany they are aoing with DHL, now a post susidiery. And the german postal service always had over-night next day delivery for letters within germany.
But if they can really pull it off, it would be amazing!
Free returns.
When buying a new model of shoe, I order at least 2, sometimes up to 4 different sizes. Try them all on, then sent back the ones that didn't fit. This has a few downsides: slight hassle of printing shipping labels and dropping off at UPS, as well as the capital outlay of paying for all those shoes. But to me, this is so vastly preferable to dragging myself to a mall or a department store that it's not even a contest.
I wouldn't recommend this for higher end shoes however, anything above $150. Both because then the capital requirements start getting onerous, and because fitting (at least for men's shoes) becomes such a crucial component you may go through more pairs before you decide than a single credit card can likely afford on Zappos :>
There are plenty of areas in which brick-and-mortar shops will take a hit from online competitors, but I suspect the impact in Europe will be considerably smaller than in the land of strip malls and Wal-Marts, where commercial efficiency has already trumped the "user experience", and Amazon is simply a better option with few disadvantages.
But also, same day delivery is logistically near impossible and quite expensive in exactly those cities for exactly the same reasons. The density doesn't make them car friendly, and certainly not delivery van friendly.
You'd go in the store and look at the merchandise, all of it in glass cases. You'd use a little golf pencil to mark the order sheet they gave you at the door for what you wanted.
When you were done shopping, you'd give your form to the guy at the register. They'd ring you up and someone in the back of the store would collect all the stuff you just bought from the warehouse racks and bring it out for you.
I was amazed something like that existed in the 90s. I have a hard time envisioning that we'd see something like that again. I mean that's how grocery stores worked once, but the market changed with self-service.
I'll occasionally "window shop" at stores, but I only do that if I know the prices are really different. If it's a $10 difference and I'm already in the store, why wait for someone to ship it to me, even if it arrives later that day?
It left the store shelves looking a lot less cluttered than they would have otherwise been, and I suspect also protected against shoplifting.
Always liked that store, actually. They sold all sorts of stuff.
In the UK there is a big chain called Argos which still does this, right down to the employees fetching the goods. This might be related to the fact that big-box retail space in the UK is much harder to come by.
Oh yes. When I lived in a small town we had a Sears catalog store. You went in and ordered your stuff there and then picked it up at the same place (this is pre-UPS). There weren't enough people living in our tiny burg for anybody to operate a full-blown department store, but the catalog store only had a couple employees and allowed us to pick up and handle a reasonable selection of the things we could then order through the catalog. I think the staff would help you measure yourself so you'd get the right size when you ordered clothing.
Similar to Dell's failed entrance into Asia, Americans are uniquely content with purchasing plenty of merchandise without ever physically examining the product.
I bought a couple of years ago an LCD monitors from today's Romanian Amazon wanna-be and they assured me that if the monitor has any broken pixels I can have it replaced. The next day after the delivery, I discovered I had 1 broken pixel. I called them back only to find out that they can replace it only if it has 3 or 4 broken pixels as specified by some ISO standard. After this, I regretted that I didn't buy the one that I saw in a regular store and worked fine.
To make sure the pages will not start falling out before you're done reading it ? I had that happen to me several times with cheap paperbacks litterally falling apart before I was even through the first quarter of the book
Watch out of Amazon Marketplace though. I bought a copy of The Wire through there that ended up being pirated (and terrible quality), and Amazon would neither refund the purchase nor shut down the vendor, even after we got a letter from HBO confirming that it was a pirated copy.
I can't complain about selection, though. Particularly if you live in an area without boutique stores, Amazon US is likely to have every product you can buy locally.
For many things, I care more about the information - does it work, does it fit, what do the reviews say? - than I do about touching the object. Even small retailers are starting to do this - if you look at http://www.marinelayer.com/ - they offer approximations of sizing based on your height and weight.