No Shoes for You

For someone who likes to shop as much as I do, and who owns as many pairs of shoes as I do, it's somewhat unusual that I have never purchased anything from Zappos. But it's not because I haven't tried to. On several occasions I have found shoes I wanted on their site, only to be disappointed when they did not have my size.

In the most recent episode, I was looking around for some casual trail-type sneakers. These are good shoes to wear on weekends if the weather is iffy, but I'm not a runner so I don't need anything overly technical. I have a pair of New Balance shoes of this type that I have not had long, maybe 18 months, and suddenly whenever I wear them they are extremely uncomfortable, so I feel like I should cut my losses and replace them.

I spent part of my lunch hour poking around sites like Zappos, looking at sneakers. I found some that I liked, and of course they didn't have my size. But the thing about this that's particularly galling is that Zappos does not tell you the inventory status until after you have clicked the "add to cart" button. Only then do you learn that the size or color you wanted isn't available.

From a customer service standpoint, this isn't an especially winning practice. More than a decade into the era of e-commerce, it is certainly possible to have accurate inventory information and to provide it to customers. Plenty of other web sites do it. I don't know why Zappos chooses to do it the way they do, and they seem to do just about everything else right, so it's puzzling.

I was eventually distracted by a different style of sneaker that Zappos also did not have in my size, so I went and bought them somewhere else.