Blog Entry EBUS_A_12FN-120

E-Commerce Innovations

Zappos, the $1.2 billion acquisition of Amazon, has not hung up its innovation hat even after fourteen years. In 2009, Zappos Labs was launched in order to sustain a start-up like attitude. It had a division in San Francisco with eleven full time employees who aimed at exploring what consumers wanted out of their shopping experiences and they then created new ways for the customers to engage on the main site. Zappos Labs was a testing ground where the members of the team were given the freedom to experiment. They had a flexible budget and they believed that the secret to innovate in e-commerce was to treat it like any other research and development project.

The target is to determine the perfect mix of content, commerce and social media. Over a dozen products have been launched from Zappos Labs. Most of them have not lived up to the expectations but a few others have shown tremendous promise. A few of their innovations are listed below.

PinPointing is an app which takes what the customers pin on Pinterest and suggests comparable items offered on Zappos. This was a result of evaluating the popularity of social networks and leveraging these social media to drive sales and growth.

Glance is an app which advocates curated items and trends depending on selections of the customer. Since inventory of Zappos can be vast: over 140,000 items from around 1,000 brands. It targets to improve user experience by offering edited product collections that are not cluttered by multistep navigation and filters.

TweetWall is another app that lets users surf the image gallery at Zappos.com and see product tweets of other customers. These tweets include the good and even the bad ones in real time. User-generated content is a secure way to drive interaction. Is there a better way to engage the customers than give them an excuse to post selfies?

 

Regards,

Shreyas Ravindran (12FN-120)

PGDM-Finance 2012-14

IMT Ghaziabad