Slashdot Mirror

In Spain, when i want to search "buy shoes" in Google, it shows mysteriously the 1st rows:

1 https://www.amazon.in/ (for India?, but it is an U.S. company!)
2. https://www.shoes.com/ (closed)
3. https://www.zappos.com/ (another U.S. company)
4. https://www.myntra.com/shoes (i am not sure) ...

That's not been my experience with Sam's club. The products offered are not the same as the ones at Walmart. They have higher quality goods at slightly better prices then elsewhere. For example, they just had a display with Uggs for $120.

As you can see from my link, that's a good price. The problem is I can go to Shoe Carnival and buy knock offs for $19.99 (terrible quality), or buy knock off's at Sam's for $45 (real sheepskin, good quality).

So for many things, it's a solid deal. I only buy winter coats from Sam's if I can help it. Other things I don't care as much about quality, or I want a wider selection. It's a trade off.

Think of the big breaches, which I tracked until about five years ago... In the Zappos breach, hackers broke into their system and stole their database. They didnt guess passwords, just stole them.
In May 2005, GMail was hacked... via JavaScript, exposing contacts, personal data without cracking (or exposing) passwords.
When CardSystems Solutions (a payment processor) was hacked and 40 million credit card numbers stolen, it was by SQL Injection. Fust full names, addresses and passwords exposed without any password guessing.
TJX (TJ Maxx, a retailer) lost 45 million credit card records in a hack... by unprotected WiFi and unencrypted records.
Google's AdWords system by surrupticious files being installed. User passwords were stolen.
About ten years ago, Internet Explorer (yeah, I know...) facilitated look-alike sites to steal Hotmail (Microsoft), GMail and Yahoo passwords... but complexity or guessing were not the issue.
When Epsilon Data Management was hacked, it wasn't via guessed passwords, but they were stolen, compromisingcustomer accounts on Citibank, Chase, Target, Walgreen and Best Buy.
LinkedIn, the professional networking site, had six million passwords cracked-and-leaked in June 2012. The process was an attack on the server storage encryption, not on password strength.

The stupid thing was, when Zappos was hacked (again, not via password theft), they then decided to impose stringent password requirements. Amazon doesn't have such stringent requirements, so just for ease I've switched most of the purchases (about four a year) I used to do from Zappos over to Amazon.

I think you need to get away from the "holster" idea. Even my Galaxy S4 in a holster is a bit too big for belt mount and frequently gets in the way.

I think you'd be better served with a small bag.

Maxpedition makes some pretty rugged gear with lots of storage and pockets, but it isn't pretty. Check out their GearSlinger line.

http://www.maxpedition.com/store/pc/viewPrd.asp?idcategory=21&idproduct=384#details

If that won't fit in, you can check out some of the leather man-purses.

Something like this:

http://www.zappos.com/fossil-estate-leather-courier-bag-cognac?zfcTest=fcl%3A0

I looked at the registration page for Zappos. It doesn't even have a "I have read and agreed to the terms of service" check box. It would seem to me that any personal info would only be related to the people registered so the registration page should have had this box.

6 pm appears to be a "value" branch of zappos: http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/ceo-and-coo-blog/2008/02/19/zapposcom-and-6pmcom

http://www.zappos.com/ugg-hats-accessories~1?gclid=CJ-YpZGj26oCFWFjTAodm2W86A

These things?

Looks like my grandmother made em, wouldn't wear the damn things.

Equally bullshit is your state trying to tax me for a purchase when I've never set foot in it.

So you'd be OK with a tax that applied only to Zappos?

So many companies today seem outright hostile to their customers. I am continually amazed how companies do their very best to avoid contact with their customers. Research has shown that people hate computer menus whether they're numerical or voice recognition. And if you do manage to fight your way past those, how many times have you heard "due to unusually high call volume"... 365 days a year, right? Insane.

It's not impossible to run a great call center. I used to work at Zappos and we did our calls in-house and usually maintained wait times under 30 seconds. And the good will we generated with customers has paid off big time. We took on several more established companies with deeper pockets and so far we've left them all in the dust, largely because of our focus on customers.

Also, it's not just about having people answering the phones. There's two other critical ingredients: the phone people have to be empowered to actually serve the customer, which means they have to be well trained, but dammit, that's what it takes to run a company. And they also need to have a voice back to the company itself, so that problems that they encounter are recognized and addressed -- because customer service problems are really just customer problems. And for all the companies spending millions on ads to establish their "brand", they could establish a real, authentic brand by resolving their customer's problems.

There is so much room to improve this kind of thing. I applaud Netflix and wish the luck. Any company that wants to take on the 800lb gorillas need only treat each customer with care and respect. The gorillas never seem to figure this out.

Cheers.

everyone knows This is what rocket boots look like!

note the flames people... note the flames

I wonder if this is about me. I've been the Director of Development for the past six years at Zappos.com, but my signature for most of that time has read "Director of Plumbing" :)

I don't think it is about me, but maybe I'm just too much of a PHB to even know! Hey, Frustrated Dilbert, if I'm the guy you're talking about just sit down with me sometime and fill me in!

Cheers.

(leaving potentially ironic signature in place)

Sorry, but I can't follow the latest standards at my job. If I did, I'd block out a couple percentage points of the market, and at the volume my employer is working, that would be millions of dollars. Seriously: millions.

The latest standards aren't even that great from a purely academic standpoint, as sadly you can't achieve the same consistency in font sizing across browsers with CSS as you can with FONT SIZE. And CSS pages seem far more prone to overlapping elements than tabled layouts. But aside from that, even if we assume that the latest standards were perfection, they still don't work for a non-negligable percentage of users. The real "standard" is the user base, no matter what anyone likes to say.

If you're following the latest standards closely, you're probably not working at a company that is making good money on the internet as its primary income. And if you are, then you're costing yourself a heck of a lot of money and you better hope the shareholders don't find out.

Cheers.

I actually met with several people from the patent office last week. They were visiting companies in Nevada to learn how patents effect our business. First thing I want to say is that they weren't a bunch of idiots and they took their job seriously.

Anyways, we discussed the idea of public patents, and there's a simple solution already. You don't have to patent anything to make it public. You just have to publish it. That's all. If you have something that could be patentable and you want to make sure that it's free for public use, just write up a whitepaper, date it, and make it available publicly on the web. Make sure it gets into the WayBack machine. They use these resources when researching patents, so it should prevent them getting granted. If not, it would still function as prior art.

Cheers.

otherwise, how can you tell if they're doing their job or not

By having real managers that observe their employees, form a good working relationship, and encourage them to do a great job, which isn't always measurable.

But very few companies want to do that which is why we hate so many of them. You can tell you're just a number. The call center for the place I work doesn't have quotas on call time or upsells. The metric is happy customers. That's it. They find good employees and empower them, monitor random call, and tend to the human aspects. It works very well for us.

I just wanted to say something about the idea that everything must be a measurable metric. Metrics can be useful in some cases (like we track call response time (average 18 seconds)) but I personally think that metrics usually encourage poor work in the interest of the quota, and people trying to game the system.

Cheers.

I've been a nearly-full-time Apple user since ~2000. I love my PowerBook, I love OSX, I love my Apple apps, and I love my iPod. But I've never felt that Apple has "excellent customer service". I mean, I'm not sure exactly what to compare it to... maybe it's better than Dell or something?

I mean, the design and overall quality of products is a part of customer service, and they have that down. But actual interaction with the company we're talking about, right?

The floor staff at the Apple store are a mixed bag... I've encountered folks who were great and folks who were not. One mistake they make is to put far too much emphasis on upselling, which makes for a used-car-sales experience. They pride themselves on saying "we don't work on commission", but don't mention that their work performance is judged solely on their ability to attach items to the order (like .mac and AppleCare).

The Genius Bar people are always worn out and a bit testy. I've worked customer service, and in my experience this is more a function of a company who never lets customer service tell customers what they want to hear, rather than just the existence of annoying customers. Case in point: virtually any type of damage to a powerbook results in a repair cost very close to purchasing a refurb unit. If your screen is cracked or your case is dented, it's $1700 flat fee, I think. Kind of ridiculous, no? I did break a Powerbook screen once, and after steaming at their prices, I was lucky enough to find another company who would do it for $600. So I'm sure Apple could do it at a better cost.

I also remember calling support on iTunes. Back when the DRM only allowed 3 computers, i ran out because I sold a machine and forgot to de-authorize the music. They did clear my authorization list, but then they reprimanded me for my error and acted like I shouldn't expect them to do that for me. Good customers service wouldn't do that in any case.

Anyways, I love Apple products, but their customer service is average at best.

Cheers.

PS - of course I may be biased as I work at Zappos, where we really do have excellent customer service. I shit you not.

And of course, absolutely no mention of stability, reliability, bugs, robustness, etc... what a suprise, considering that both MSSQL and MySQL are arguably far behind in those areas.

I don't usually get involved in these discussions, because it's just armchair politics. But look -- I'm an employee for a highly successful company built on top of MySQL, and it works great. Hundreds of tables, many with hundreds of millions of rows. Our primary DB averages over 1200 queries per second (yes, that's an average over several months). 15 percent of those are writes. Our system is stable. MySQL is a solid database, end of story.

Cheers.

Well, that's understandable. It can be a chore for retailers to support the web.

Not really. Assuming you have a web designer on board who's made more than a couple real-world pages, and you can keep the marketing/business types from forcing the site to use annoying high-tech crap and rich media. So far, my company has pulled it off.

Feel free to complain that we're using somewhat hacky HTML 3.2, but our site works in every browser we've come across since IE/NS 4. "Keep it simple" is all it really takes. And users seem to like it better as well.

Cheers.

It is also interesting to see the most popular web sites. Start by typing www. into google suggest. The top 10 are:

1. www.yahoo.com - Search/Directory
2. www.hotmail.com - Email
3. www.google.com - Search
4. www.ebay.com - Shopping
5. www.msn.com - Portal
6. www.aol.com - Portal
7. www.ebay.co.uk - Shopping
8. www.irs.gov - Government
9. www.mapquest.com - Maps
10. www.amazon.com - Shopping

Typing one more letter shows you the top sites for that letter. Here is the top for each letter:

• a is for www.aol.com - Portal
• b is for www.bbc.co.uk - News
• c is for www.cnn.com - News
• d is for www.dictionary.com - Reference
• e is for www.ebay.com - Shopping
• f is for www.food.gov.uk - Government
• g is for www.google.com - Search
• h is for www.hotmail.com - Email
• i is for www.irs.gov - Government
• j is for www.juno.com - Internet service provider
• k is for www.kbb.com - Consumer information
• l is for www.lyrics.com - Music
• m is for www.msn.com - Portal
• n is for www.nick.com - Kids
• o is for www.orbitz.com - Travel
• p is for www.pogo.com - Games
• q is for www.qvc.com - Shopping
• r is for www.rotten.com - Information
• s is for www.sears.com - Shopping (sorry slashdot)
• t is for www.target.com - Shopping
• u is for www.usps.com - Government
• v is for www.verizon.com - Telephone service
• w is for www.weather.com - Weather
• x is for www.xanga.com - Blogs
• y is for www.yahoo.com - Portal
• z is for www.zappos.com - Shopping

This is some random commentary to make sure that my post has enough characters per line on average to get by the lameness filter. Just a few more words should do it. Then I will be over the limit. Maybe you would like to hear a bit about my projects: Attesoro - A internationalization editor for Java programs. Coinmill - A currency conversion website with many currencies, and features such as abilty to parse English sentences asking for currency conversion. Java Utilities - Utilities for common task in the Java programming language such as parsing CSV files and string manipulation.

At Zappos.com we're pretty straight with reviews. We reject anything that is irrelevant or vulgar, but let through positive, negative, even weird reviews. Because of this they're one of the most popular features of the site.

Vaguely related: there's been a huge increase in review spamming for online casinos recently... they never get through, but that bot just keeps on trying.

Cheers.

My point was more that it is much much harder to upgrade a system when it's managed internally.

Wow, in my (admittedly limited) experience, this is the exact opposite of what I would say. At the company I work for nearly everything is written in house. We even wrote our own warehouse management software (in Perl!?!). On the occasions that we outsource development, it has always proven more difficult and time-consuming to get the contractors and outsource companies to make the changes we need. We almost always end up writing an in-house version after tiring of the external software management cycle.

Just my $0.02.

Cheers.

Just implemented SecurID at my job and so far it seems to be quite good. We require a username, password, and the token code. It was a little bit annoying at first, but I think people agree it's a lot less annoying than a overly agressive password policy (10 characters! letters numbers and symbols! change every two weeks! never reuse a password!) -- and probably more secure.

Cheers.

Most people don't really understand why this is so true. They get all caught up on the idea that some customers are actually wrong, or trouble makers, or whatever. But here's the skinny:

The losses you suffer from taking it in the rear for lousy customers is miniscule compared to what you lose when you treat normal customers with suspicion and disrespect in an effort to protect yourself.

Luckily, the company I work for gets this right. And we keep growing at a phenomenal rate, mostly through word of month. I am often amazed at what we do to keep the good word-of-mouth going.

Are there insatiable customers? Sure. Do your best to please them and move on. Let them enjoy the little world they've created for themeselves with their tempertantrums. Chances are all their friends and family find them annoying too. I remember one of our service people returning a nasty call and talking to the irate customer's wife. She said, in essense, "Oh, he's such a mean bastard. Don't listen to a word he says. I'll set him straight when he gets home." We had a good laugh.

Oh, and BestBuy's problem is that they've set up a dishonest business model that depends on misleading customers with sales and rebates. So now their whining that it's not working for them. If you have a honest business model then you rarely get angry at your customers.

Cheers.

I'm glad the solution is working well for you. Best wishes to you.

Okay -- sorry if I got a bit snippy there :)

I am curious as to what aspects of MySQL you find to be superior to Firebird or PostgreSQL?

I don't know enough about those RDBMSs inparticular to say. I like MySQL better than Oracle because it's cheaper and easier to administer. I am familiar with the more advanced features that MySQL lacks, but these have not been an issue in my experience. Since it meets my needs I haven't searched for something different. Note: I am using InnoDB tables which offer transactions, and more importantly to me row-level locking for higher concurrency.

My "best tool for the job" rating includes the fact that it is already doing the job; which is not trivial. I certainly wouldn't call anyone a fool for using PostgreSQL for a similar task, but I don't see any compelling reason to switch. If I had started with PostgreSQL (my research indicated it wasn't fast or stable enough at the time) I might be singing its praises today instead of MySQL.

My aim is not to convert anyone else to use MySQL, but rather to shoot down the meme that MySQL can't be used for real work, which comes up in every MySQL thread on slashdot.

I'm also curious about the 200 queries/sec. You have a setup with 50 inserts, updates, and deletes per second? I am indeed impressed.

Whoops - I made a mistake there: we average 81% selects -- I was looking at the current (2 second) number as opposed to the uptime average when I posted :/ Still, yes, our system often hits 50 writes per second (and higher), though that is not maintained.

This is for Zappos.com. I'm the lead engineer there, and it has grown faster than I could ever have imagined. We actually run two DB's, a primary and a replicated server. Both run on the beefiest Opteron systems you could buy last year. The primary averages 186 qps with 81% selects, and the replicated server averages 33 qps with 26% selects -- though that's misleading because it has to do all the same writes as the primary but handles only a portion of the slower reporting queries.

Most of our writes are for our recommendation engine, which tracks user viewing habits in real time to offer shoe suggestions. This feature is not promoted on the site yet, though it is live in testing.

Perl is a great tool. I never would have thought ill of you for it.

Heh... I just threw that in because I've often been told that Perl is a doomed language by the same people who tell my MySQL is a doomed database. As I said in an eariler post somewhere, I lean towards the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" school. It has served me pretty well thus far, but I still bump heads with the purists from time to time ;)

Thanks for you thoughtful replies.

...is to order them from Zappos.com :) Shameless plug, I know... but how else are you going to buy shoes from geeks?

The system runs on FreeBSD, Linux, Apache, MySQL and is written in perl. The warehouse of over half a million shoes is completely computer sorted by unique barcodes on each box and shelf. The whole system for which was designed and implemented inhouse by our small team (thee coders, at the time). We offer free shipping and free return shipping so there's no risk, and we respond faster than any other online retailer.

Okay. I'll shut up now.

Sorry -- it seemed on topic and I love my job :)

you can see Apple's point. He gets it and doesn't like it, sends it back, and they have to pull out the RAM, extra HDs - a giant pain in the arse. Why should they?

Ha ha ha! That's pretty funny!

They should do it because it's their job to please their customers and it makes for good business. Anything less is basically stupid. That's right: stupid.

I work for a company that bends over backwards to please our customers. We just instated a 365 day return policy. And we offer free return shipping. Yes, it's a giant pain in the arse. It costs us extra money. But customers love it. They always thank us, tell us how rare good treatment is, and pledge their loyalty when we go the extra mile like that. In the end, we've spent a little extra to do these things and got back tenfold in repeat business and word of mouth.

Sure, there are cases where a customer is trying to rip you off. If the shoes are noticably worn when they're returned, we would balk at a full refund. But in most cases the customer is returning because they're honestly unhappy. Make them happy. That is your job as a business. You may lose a little money on this, and even get screwed occasionally by a complete jerk that you misidentified, but in the end you'll be better off because most people are respectable and fair and they appreciate being treated that way.

Cheers.

PS -- feel free to trash me for criticizing Apple. I'm a non-zealot Mac user so I'm used to it :)

I used to think so. But I was forced by economics at my current employer to just keep on hacking. For years I predicted the imminent collapse of our system under the weight of a thousand hacks.

But it never collapsed. And the functionality and performance has been greatly increased. And we've added five more developers. And we're profitable.

And because the original design was decent, there have been no catastrophic failures, or impenetrable bugs.

Sure, we've rewritten many small parts of the system, but in a very iterative fashion. And there are some bits of old (ugly) code pushing four years now that still do their job just fine.

Maybe this only applies to web development in perl (small CGIs using simple function-oriented modules with SQL to interface to a DB). And maybe it only works for companies using technology as support (as opposed to the company being _about_ technology). But there it works and it works well.

Maybe here's the deal: we're always doing a "complete rewrite" -- it just takes us a decade and we do it a little bit at a time. But the point I think is that tearing out the guts usually causes more problems than it solves.

Cheers.

Doesn't seem the article tests the system with >4GB. That seems odd since that is one of the most compelling reasons to go 64bit (other than pure bragging rights).

My company upgraded to SuSE on Opteron a few months back, and had some random memory corruption with our 8GB setup. Turned out it was some bad interaction between the Tyan motherboard, the BIOS, and the stepping 1 of the Opteron. What a pain.

We're stable now with 4GB, but the memory was the only reason we upgraded in the first place. I'd like to see more tests with lots of memory.

Cheers

Yeah, I've worked in support too. But unlike you I still realize that a company doesn't exist for any other reason that to please customers. End of story.

There are companies who get this right. The company I work for, has a similar policy, and we occasionally eat crow to please a customer. Guess what? The benefits of that approach have far outweighed the cost. We've had more profitable quarters in a row than Apple. It's just good business.

Now -- maybe this particular issue with the ipod isn't a real problem if the people go through the right steps. But my original point is valid and well documented: Apple says "we don't care" far more often than a company should (for their own good).

Cheers.

Didn't know Microsoft sold shoes...

As an employee of a profitable online retailer (admittedly a rare beast) I would say that convenience and selection play a large role. The product doesn't even have to be that rare (my company sells shoes). It can be a pain to find a specific thing out in the world if you know exactly what you want - online it can be a breeze. In the real world, even if you know where it is, a 10 mile drive and purchase can take 30 minutes of your time, wheras an online purchase can take under 10 minutes - although you do have to wait for delivery... but it's still a net gain in many circumstances.

All I can say is that a lot of people find value in online retail. If the retailer is smart at keeping their operational costs low, they can be quite successful.