Amazon.com launches independent Endless.com

January 5th, 2007 at 9:34 am

Probably catching up to the Gap redesign from last year (which they’ve claimed has performed really well) + success of Zappos

January 5th, 2007 at 9:49 am

Sounds like the Amazon brand (big box e-tailer, cheap, books, etc.) doesn’t fly with trend-setting, well-to-do women who want to buy shoes and handbags online. Creating brands for specific demographics and leveraging your core (technology and distribution for Amazon) makes sense to me.

January 5th, 2007 at 10:01 am

I really like Amazon’s new Endless.com store (ie, site). It’s a great idea although not new. Think Old Navy…GAP and Banana Republic, which are owned by the same company. Williams & Sonoma owns Pottery Barn. McDonald’s owns Chipotle, just to name a few.

The new Endless.com store is much cleaner looking, more stylish in design and product selections and more engaging with better product photos. It’s appealing to a different target demographics than that of the Amazon.com store. I don’t buy shoes online but after looking through their shoes selections on Endless, I would consider getting a pair of those Bruno Magli Raspino boots (very nice) !!

Agree with @1 Andrew M. about the name Endless. I don’t like. For me it brings negativity to mind because the word is usually used negatively.

January 5th, 2007 at 10:17 am

Poor Zappos is going to get blown out of the water by Amazon.

January 5th, 2007 at 10:25 am

Hi all,

I think a lot of sites suffer from excessive clutter. Basically people are optimizing sites to the nth degree to get the maximum revenue from current customers. However not everyone wants to see the mess that Amazon sticks in your browser.

Endless is great if you know what you want and want to find it fast. Most shoe shopping sites have hopeless search functionality. If you need some guidance, sites like Shopbop and Nordstrom are better for you.

-Chris

January 5th, 2007 at 10:36 am

I think its a simple experiment by Amazon in nifty AJAX shopping UI. The basic amazon user wouldn’t understand this, so this is their testing ground for new forms of AJAX UI. Think of it like a searchmash for Amazon..

And they probably chose shoes because Zappos already killed them in it, so this is somewhat of a dead-already business, so its just a fun playground for AJAX shopping.

January 5th, 2007 at 11:15 am

@Dan & Darren…shoes online is a BIG business ($3bn this year) Offering free overnight shipping ($20+ per order) is quite a hefty investment to merely demonstrate an AJAX tool or web services.

And I would say there’s still plenty of room to grow in the online shoe business. I think the design of the site (better than any other player in my opinion) and the free overnight will give them the opportunity to build share.

-Chris

January 5th, 2007 at 11:29 am

It’s a very nice site. Maybe the site is the finished product that they envisioned. Or, just maybe, this is a very polished site that competes with existing online shoes stores, and they are now preparing a future version that’ll really knock our socks off! (sorry for the sock reference…it was too much fun to resist). I look forward to seeing what they do with it.

January 5th, 2007 at 11:46 am

To this point, Amazon has been the Ford of ecommerce, building economies of scale by offering limited options in shopping experience (for both retail and white-label stores).

Endless suggests they realize that it’s time to start offering a differentiated experience (the same way GM started offering different colors, models, and brands). Fashion items are a perfect place to start experimenting.

January 5th, 2007 at 12:45 pm

This isn’t an experiment. It’s the only way Amazon could ever reach a very wealthy, very profitable market. Well-to-do women, celebrities, they would never buy their shoes on Amazon.com. They buy designer brands for hundreds of dollars, usually in very expensive boutiques. Now some companies want to get some of that business online and realize they can’t do it with the same site selling bargain footwear for $20 — these customers just won’t shop there — it’s below them. This is like what Zappos did with the Zappos Couture website, but taken a step further, creating an entirely new brand.

January 5th, 2007 at 2:46 pm

makes sense dan. but as an article points out (http://tinyurl.com/yj4lpe), they’re not even selling a lot of the very fashion popular brands.
i think they’re expermenting with one stand alone concept store to see how it does. might be a good way for them to expand into other upscale niche areas.

January 5th, 2007 at 2:50 pm

Here is something similar, at least in that it’s an ajax-ified shopping UI:

zoomshelf.com

(I work on this site, so this comment is a shameless self-plug. Sorry.)

January 5th, 2007 at 3:05 pm

Finally recognition from Amazon that the buying experience can get a *lot* better with a dedicated site.

January 5th, 2007 at 4:22 pm

I don’t feel like signing up for the forum, but in new ie, if you don’t have the screen maximized part of the words get cut off on the right side. pretty annoying.

January 5th, 2007 at 6:20 pm

I dont think its dumb to open up specialty e-tailers…the backing of amazon increases their chances of success!

January 5th, 2007 at 8:45 pm

>>What’s with shoe sizes like 42eu

This is standard with some lines of footwear; some are only euro sized. It gets dodgy when attempting to translate because they’re different by gender and product line. However, with the resources of Amazon this should be a no brainer. I’ve done it with a 1 person resource (me).

January 5th, 2007 at 9:14 pm

very slick - the AJAX browsing works very nicely. They have made something quite convoluted (browsing items based on colour, type, size etc etc) into a relatively quick and page-refresh-free process.

January 5th, 2007 at 11:05 pm

I think Amazon.com do not need to categories totally but this shall help shoppers across the world who are looking for particular thing. There are many items which comes in diffrent diffrent category but when you search those items on the Amazon.com site you find all sorts of unwanted item along which comes similar in the category.

So, even if amazon comes up with this categories plan they shall start with fast moving consumer goods as well.

January 6th, 2007 at 12:59 am

I’m not surprised to see this. Amazon’s actually made a few moves in the past year to bone up its fashion traffic, probably sensing that there’s money to be had in the womens shopping niche? I’m not sure. There wasn’t a lot of hub bub about it but they bought the very popular boutique etailer ShopBop.com (www.shopbop.com) last year or something, and suddenly we’re hearing and seeing a lot of chatter in the shopping circles online about people finding good deals on the regular Amazon site (which hadn’t happened before). I’m not overly impressed with Endless from a user interface but I see brands that are in demand among the shopping circles and then traditional consumer favorites so that’s good. They’re doing something right with that in my opinion.

I just got a pair of $220 flat sole chocolate brown fold over boots for $23 shipped off the regular Amazon site, so Amazon’s definitely on my good side. I think they need a little work on the user experience if they come strong into the womens shopping/fashion niche, but overall, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

January 6th, 2007 at 7:03 am

So I’m assuming this isn’t part of Amazon Associates ’cause I can’t find that on Endless.

And Endless has some beautiful ballet flats, but none of them have I seen in my big ol’ size 11 yet!

http://paulamooney.blogspot.com

January 6th, 2007 at 11:13 am

@ Esme, I’m sure they’ll add high end (to compete with zappos couture) soon, though I would guess it’ll likely be brands like Marc by Marc Jacobs, Stewart Weitzman, etc.

I actually never buy shoes of Zappos for this reason - I don’t care for the brands they carry, including the couture store. Saks, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorfgoodman are the main ones I shop.

January 6th, 2007 at 12:16 pm

Am I the only one that finds it amusing that they’ve branded this thing Beta? Since when do retail sites that sell to consumers label themseleves as operating in Beta?

January 6th, 2007 at 6:07 pm

@ Esme…no one’s going to carry those online unless they have a brick and mortar store of appropriate “quality.” Luxury brands are still very allergic to the web. The only reason eluxury gets anything is that it’s owned by LVMH.

-Chris

January 13th, 2007 at 11:57 am

I side with those who see this as an experiment. Look at it this way: What would it cost Amazon to set up something like this? Payment processing, fulfillment, all that ugly back end stuff is already a solved problem. The ecommerce site infrastructure is a solved problem. All the hard problems that an online retailer burns money on are solved problems. The only costs left are the actual web development and whatever they choose to spend on promotions.

They can play with different UI ideas, different branding ideas, different promotional strategies, all kinds of things, and see what works, at a cost which for Amazon is no doubt negligible. If it’s a stinker, they can drown it in the well out back without anyone being the wiser. And if this or any similar small scale venture takes off, they can take what’s generalizeable about it and integrate it into the main Amazon site.

I’m reminded of Google Labs, actually– throw ten smart people at each of 50 problems, if any of them actually hit on something cool, either integrate it into the main Google offering or just push it on its own. If none of them hit on anything then compared to the amount of business you’re doing it’s still pretty harmless.