Making Sure the Shoe Fits at Zappos.com

What happens when you treat every customer as if they might be a reporter? Occasionally, one of them is a reporter: “Last spring, I called Zappos.com about a pair of shoes I wanted to buy for my upcoming wedding that they did not have in my size. The representative said Zappos.com would e-mail me when the right-sized shoes arrived back in stock. But she didn’t stop there. While I was on the phone, she searched for the shoes on the Web sites of Piperlime and Endless, two of Zappos.com’s major competitors. When she didn’t find them there in my size, she gave me the customer service phone numbers for those sites so I could call them, in case they got the shoes in stock first.”