Zappos Review

Over the next several weeks, this place is going to get pretty crazy with product reviews.

I’ve got five or six different products lined up to review, and hope to knock them out at least at the rate of one per week – or even more frequently if I can somehow manage it. However, since I’m coming up on some races between now and the end of May, there will also be nervous speculations and race reports to go along with the newspaper articles and training snippets and all the other regularly scheduled nonsense that goes on here. I guess what I’m saying is, things are starting to get pretty busy.

Today’s review is somewhat unorthodox, as I don’t have anything tangible that I’m putting to the test on the trail. Rather, I was asked to review the online shoe vendor Zappos.com – specifically, the walking shoes section of the website. I know there aren’t direct implications for runners here, so I’ll try to keep this quick.

Zappos is one of the bigger players in the online shoe market, and they actually do have a good selection of running shoes available (but I’m promising to stay on topic, so that’s the last I’ll mention it). Do a Google search on just about any shoe brand, and a Zappos offer will inevitably show up on the first page of results.

I’ve never actually purchased shoes from them, but my wife has - so once again I asked her to help with the heavy lifting in evaluating the site. Here’s what we came up with:

Strengths:

• Free shipping and free return shipping on all purchases. This is a nice touch – but as my wife explained, it’s really more of a necessity than a “perk”. Many shoppers (including my wife) need to be able to try shoes on to see how they fit, feel, and look before making a purchase – and they need to be able to return items without penalty. Zappos was one of the first shoe retailers to recognize this, but now this service seems to be the industry standard.

• Huge selection: Zappos carries just about every brand you can think of. Within each brand, they carry more models than you knew existed. Just for kicks, I looked at the men's Rockport listings on the walking shoes page (I wear Rockports at work), and there are 246 models available. Basically, you’ll never have to worry about the availability of a current model shoe.

• Customer reviews: the number of reviews for each model I looked at was fairly high – and some people (like the woman I’m married to) place a lot of stock in customer reviews for models she’s unfamiliar with. Some shoe vendors may have a handful of reviews for each model; at Zappos, the average seems more like 50 to 100. More information for the consumer is usually a good thing.

• Price: the discounts aren’t huge (more on that in a minute), but the price points at Zappos are pretty much in line with traditional retailers. Which means that if the Rockports I want aren’t available at my local Macy’s, or I don’t feel like driving 20 minutes to buy them - both very plausible scenarios - I can get them from Zappos for the same price, without paying any extra for the convenience of shopping in my pajamas.

Drawbacks:

• Price: I know, I just listed that as a strength, but my wife made an observation I hadn’t thought of – namely, that the discounts at Zappos aren’t as good as some other sites. This works in a couple of different ways: 1) the sale and clearance items are often only 10 or 15% off retail, which isn’t hard to find from most retailers, and 2) on any given day, the percentage of overall inventory in the Zappos sale section is less than on some other sites.

This was somewhat verified by my Rockport search: of the 246 men’s models available, 103 were on sale – which seems like a decent percentage, although I have no idea how that compares to other sites. However, very few of the shoes on that 103 item list were discounted more than 10%. So while you’re not getting ripped off at Zappos, you probably won’t find huge savings, either.

The discrepancy seems odd, in that Zappos excels at having so many current models available, but comes up short in moving old ones off the shelf. They carry one previous version of many shoe models, but these are typically only discounted 10%. By comparison, when I shop for Montrails (oops – I wasn’t supposed to mention running again. Sorry.) online, I frequently find old models discounted by 40 or 50%. Predictably, those cheaper sites are usually where I spend my money.

Zappos seems like a solid business that has earned its good reputation primarily with its great selection; if they could just get more aggressive with pricing their old models, their growth potential is enormous. Especially if they start marketing to runners, I suspect that they would become an online powerhouse – and they’d definitely make a customer out of me.

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Shop for Zappos walking shoes here.


See previous product reviews on sidebar at right. If you have a product you’d like reviewed, contact me at info@runningandrambling.com.