zappos

Revitalizing downtown Las Vegas with 100 Tesla Model S cars

Tony Hsieh made shopping for shoes easy. It also made him a fortune when he sold Zappos to Amazon for around $850 million. Lately, he has been focusing on revitalizing downtown Las Vegas, and 100 of Tesla's all-electric Model S cars are part of the plan.

With a base price of $52,400 (after a $7,500 federal tax credit), the Teslas are part of a collaborative transportation system designed to free people from owning cars and at less than the monthly cost of traditional car ownership. Called Project 100, the transportation system will also include more than 100 … Read more

So where will people shop today that isn't Amazon?

Today is expected to be one of the biggest days ever for online shopping, but where will people be making some of their purchases may be surprising.

According to Deepfield, which provides technology to track and analyze network performance, some of the top Internet retailers are the usual suspects, like Amazon, while some others, such as Shopify, are more unexpected.

The company conducted a large-scale study of online shopping infrastructure over the past several months, using data from its ongoing study of Internet backbone traffic.

What it has found is that Amazon, of course, dominates Internet retail. About 14 percent … Read more

Top Black Friday apps for iOS

Black Friday is rapidly approaching and we all know that means people are going to be hitting the stores both online and at brick-and-mortar locations to grab gifts for friends and family. But if you want to find the best deals, you're going to need a little help, and I have just the right apps for the job on iOS devices.

Whether you plan to brave the crowds on Black Friday or stay home and shop online, these apps will get you the best deals and hopefully make your gift shopping a little easier.

Editors' note: For Android shopping … Read more

Amazon shutters popular shoe site endless.com

Never fear, Amazon says, it's not really closing down its trendy shoe and accessory Web site endless.com -- it's migrating it to Amazon.com/Fashion.

The company posted a note on its Web site today saying that it has "exciting news." Apparently, as of September 27, endless.com will be no more. The goal for the company is to integrate this mainly shoe Web site into its bigger apparel site.

Here's more from endless.com:

This new style destination will have the latest shoes, handbags, jewelry and watches from an expanded selection of brands--including … Read more

With Pinpointing, Zappos hooks up Pinterest with e-commerce

Amazon's online shoe seller Zappos is combining the popularity of Pinterest with its own products in a new service.

Dubbed Pinpointing, the service delivers Zappos products based on what a user has pinned. In addition, the service will list products that had been pinned recently. Pinpointing lists a host of product categories, including shoes, skirts, dresses, and jeans.

In order to take advantage of the features, users can enter their own Pinterest username to see what sort of Zappos recommendations might relate to their previously pinned items. They can also input another person's username to see recommendations based … Read more

Make yourself less vulnerable online (video)

Zappos, LinkedIn, eHarmony, Yahoo, LastFm, the Environmental Protection Agency, Stanford, and Columbia University -- all suffered online data breaches recently, says the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

In fact, this year alone, there have been 276 data breaches, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. Statistics indicate that private sector businesses and the health-care industry were most vulnerable, falling victim to, respectively, 37 percent and 34 percent of the breaches. Educational institutions and the government/military sector had breach rates of 14 percent and 11 percent, respectively. The rate for financial companies came in at just more than 3 percent, according to … Read more

Zappos, LLBean most responsive retailers on Twitter -- report

If you want a customer service answer on Twitter, you'll have your best luck tweeting Zappos or LLBean. (Assuming that's where you did your shopping.)

Out of the top 25 online retailers, Zappos and LLBean proved the most responsive on Twitter, answering 100 percent of customer tweets within 24 hours, according to STELLAservice, an independent rater of online customer-service performance that posted its findings in a blog entry posted today.

The other top retailers answered an average of 44 percent of customer services questions.

For the study, mystery shoppers tweeted daily customer service questions to the Twitter accounts … Read more

Can't someone please fix online shipping, already?

As I write this column, I'm on my seventh day of waiting for a Nordstrom package to arrive, and I am fuming. My order was received April 6, it didn't ship until three days ago, and it's still not here. And all I can think is, "I wish I'd ordered that through Amazon."

That's the sentence that should, and probably does, strike fear into the heart of any company doing e-commerce retail today. So why is Amazon still one of the few companies successfully executing free and timely shipping?

"Free shipping is … Read more

Rumgr is the iPhone app Craigslist should have built

There's something fun about rummaging through garage sales, but what if you could see what people are selling near you before spending the time driving all around your neighborhood?

Starting today, Rumgr, which has been in beta and attracting a small but loyal following in its home base of Las Vegas, is hoping to help with that problem. The company, which was founded by former Zappos employees Dylan Bathurst, Ray Morgan, and Alex Coleman, has released the second version of its iPhone app, a tool that lets buyers see what is being sold near where they are right now … Read more