I love a lot about Zappos: the customer-centered service, the way Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO, evangelizes and models the competitive advantage of emergent and sustained corporate values. I love the way they call me a VIP for really what is a modest number of transactions. Yet many of those transactions are returns. Again today, for the nth time, I am returning shoes to Zappos that don’t fit. I don’t love that.
I wanted to order some Converse Slips and I wanted to be sure that I ordered the right size. This was even more challenging than usual because Converse Slips are a unisex shoe so there are male and female reviewers and I had to mentally parse that. There is also guidance summarized under Product Information: “Women’s sizes should be true to size.” I diligently slogged through a few pages of the 1,222 customer reviews and found the ones from women, as best I could, based on the name or the comment. The customer reviewers confirmed what was written in the Product Information – true to size – so I went ahead and ordered based on this. Yet when the shoes arrived, they were a size too big. I also ordered a pair of Keds at the same time. This was a new spring style so it had no customer reviews. I just had to go with my usual size. But it, too, was too big. <sigh>
As I filled out my return form, Zappos asked “What could we have done to prevent this return?” At first I thought, nothing, your 365 day and easy return process already help a lot. And they do. But even with the great return process, I hate doing the returns. And I do think twice about ordering from Zappos because too often the shoes don’t fit and I have to do a return.
Zappos is trying to help me find shoes that fit, through the usual “user generated content” – the customer review. The Converse Slips I ordered had 1,222 customer reviews. Customer reviewers can give stars for “overall”, “comfort” and “style”. There is a customer feedback summary in the left sidebar with an “overall rating” and a “customer fit survey”.
I have very ordinary feet. Size, width – I’m pretty plain vanilla. But like most women, it still takes way too much time for me to find shoes that fit in the store. Online, therefore, size is a particular challenge. With all this information, I was very optimistic when I first tried Zappos. But the information isn’t, in the end, helping me make a better buying decision.
What could Zappos do to prevent this return? It seems to me that Zappos must have a lot of data about how shoes fit by manufacturer over time, ripe for some data mining and predictive analytics. Why is Zappos only offering me help from other customers, when they are sitting on a wealth of order (and return) information? Zappos know what styles and sizes are being returned and exchanged for other sizes. It’s all in their order database. They must see which manufacturers size 8.5B is consistent year to year, style to style, and which ones jump all over the place. Why not use this information to create a “Zappos size” by manufacturer, by style? One that improves over time?
For a brand new style, Zappos has information from previous new styles from this manufacturer. Keds have been around a long time, but Zappos couldn’t offer me any information on sizing because this was a new style and no customers had posted reviews yet. Yet they know how Keds in my size have fit previously. I can hunt and find this information by checking other Keds, true, but why not integrate it into my shopping process?
Zappos could also use this data to provide feedback to shoe manufactures and hopefully apply some of their market and brand power to get manufacturers to actually have some form of QA around their sizing.
Zappos, you can make me happier and help prevent this return by turning your data into useful information using business analytics.
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