Interview:

Beyond Shoes: Finding The Perfect Size, Fit, And Experience For Online Shopping

An interview with Zappos.com’s Brent Cromley

Intro: Zappos.com is synonymous with online shoe shopping, and has built its reputation and a loyal fan base on outstanding customer service, including free shipping both ways. But the quintessential shoe site has moved far beyond footwear into clothing, housewares, electronics and more. And it has ported its successful Web site and fulfillment capabilities to other brands through its “Powered by Zappos” service. Now, it’s trying to ensure its growth in apparel and other product lines through an ambitious Web site rebuild centered around a powerful new search function and other enhancements. Benchmark recently caught up with Senior Director of Engineering Brent Cromley to find out how Zappos is stepping out to go after bigger online retail success.

Benchmark: You’ve recently redone the Zappos Web site, and we’re anxious to learn all about it. When did the new version go live?

Brent Cromley: We soft-launched it in September of last year. We’ve been running a hybrid site, where we’ve slowly been sending more and more traffic to the new site. We have been very careful about the switch-over for two reasons. One, we’re radically altering the user experience and we want to make the transition as gentle as possible. And two, we’re very closely monitoring our SEO rankings. A complete switchover all at once would drop all the organic search rankings we’ve built up. So by slowing phasing it in and letting the new site build up some of its page ranks, we can slowly transition that over and not have a month or two hiccup where all of a sudden we’re not showing up high in the organic search results.

Benchmark: So how are you dividing the traffic up? How are you determining who is going to see the new site, and who is going to see the old site?

Brent Cromley: Right now if you search on the old site, 100 percent of those searches are redirected over to the new site. That was one of the first things we did, because search performs much better on the new site. Also, if you go to a brand page or product, these will also be powered by the new site. So what we haven’t switched over yet are some of the static pages and some of the intermediate landing pages. That represents roughly around 20 percent of the site traffic waiting to be switched over. And those are the ones we’re still building up the search rankings for.