Overview
Zappos.com is a large online shoe retailer that sells thousands of types of shoes, as well as bags, clothing, and accessories. Like its parent company, Amazon.com, Zappos has mass consumer appeal, so its website has been designed to serve a broad range of users. This case study reviews Zappos’ website and how it has been designed to support the company’s mission to provide the best customer service possible.

What resources are being organized?
The primary resources on Zappos.com are digital descriptions of the physical products that Zappos sells. Product descriptions include pictures, the price, available sizes, and customer reviews. In terms of granularity, a single product page for a pair of shoes or article of clothing may actually include dozens of variations of that item given the size and color options, with some variations having different prices. Zappos groups these variations together rather than giving each one a separate page.

Shoes can be difficult to buy online because customers cannot try on the product and test the fit before purchase. Zappos uses its customer review feature not only to collect review information, but to administer a “fit survey”. The survey asks a reviewer to rate the shoe’s support and whether the shoe felt true to size and width. This information is aggregated across reviews for each shoe and is prominently featured on the product page. In addition, the customer reviews include other experiences with the products such as whether a shoe is of good quality and construction. The fit information and customer reviews are essential for helping customers understand what it is like to wear the shoes being described.

Why are the resources organized?
The product descriptions on Zappos.com are organized to help customers find and browse shoes and other products for purchase. This search system must be easy to use in order for each unique customer to be able to quickly filter out tens of thousands of products before browsing just a subset they are interested in. A typical customer starts by entering a general search query like “winter boots” into the search bar. Then the customer is presented with a grid of product images. At this point, the customer might filter items by gender (men’s boots), price ($200 and under), and color (black). The results can additionally be filtered by brand, style, and other properties, or sorted by price and customer rating.

Once the customer has reviewed an item’s product page including the other customer reviews, the customer can “add to favorites” to remember the item for later or “add to cart” to save the item for purchase. After purchase, the customer may review the the item, thus contributing additional information to Zappos’ collection of product descriptions.

How much are the resources organized?
Zappos.com employs both a hierarchical classification system and a faceted classification system to organize its product descriptions. From the home page, the classification system appears hierarchical with top-level categories for women’s, men’s, and kids’, which are each subdivided into clothing, shoes, and other product categories. After clicking on a subcategory like “women’s shoes”, the customer is taken to another page that shows that subcategory broken down further (e.g., boots and slippers).

After clicking on another subcategory, or when using the search bar at the top of the website, the faceted classification system is immediately apparent. The left-hand menu becomes a tool for filtering the products shown. Prominent facets like color and type (e.g., for shoes: boots, sandals, athletic, etc.) are based on intrinsic static properties. Other facets like price and average customer rating are based on extrinsic dynamic properties. Curiously, while the fit survey information is prominently displayed on each product page, this information is not accessible for filtering.

When are the resources organized?
Product descriptions are first organized when they are created for a new product. As customers buy and review the products, they provide sales and rating information by which the product descriptions are continually organized. This information is used by later customers to sort by “Best Sellers” and “Customer Rating”. As the physical product inventory is sold, and certain sizes or colors of a product sell out or get discounted, the product description page continues to be updated. This maintenance of the product description continues until the item is eventually removed from the collection of products sold by Zappos.

Who does the organizing?
The product descriptions are organized by both humans and automated processes. The descriptions and product reviews are originally created by people and then made accessible to customers by automated processes. Customers browsing product descriptions can help organize the reviews on any given product page by marking reviews as helpful, where the most helpful reviews will be listed first in the list of reviews. As products are sold, automated processes manage marking items as best sellers and sorting items by average rating.

Other Considerations
Zappos.com’s faceted organizing system can be used to help with the vocabulary problem of describing shoe styles. For example, what some people call “sneakers”, others call “tennis shoes” or “athletic shoes”. Zappos’ classification system allows the same product to be classified with all three facets. In addition, this system has been designed for thousands of new products to be added each year. As shoe styles change over time, the faceted classification scheme will allow Zappos to create and add new descriptive facets for filtering products in a way that is understandable to customers of the time.