My room is now a perpetual fitting room. There is always a Zappos box sitting somewhere, with products waiting to be tried on or returned.
I've been waiting to find a substitute for the mall for a while now, and I think I finally have it. Take, for example, the simple task of finding a black hat with no logos or lettering on it. Trying to accomplish this at the mall took me about 1.5 hours, and I still didn't find a single one. Doing this on Zappos took ten minutes, and I found five of them. And I ordered all of them.
Most of my orders on Zappos are for about five items at a time, and I'll usually return four. If there's a shoe I want, I order three of them: one at the size I want, and the others plus-or-minus 0.5 shoe-sizes. If I return some article of clothing, and start to regret it, I quickly remember that hell, I can just buy it again, without incurring any extra cost.
What got me started on my Zappos-training ultimately came from this video on how their free shipping works:
Somehow Zappos realized that their biggest customer acquisition barrier is the unfamiliarity or skepticism with the Zappos-way—kind of like in Miracle on 34th Street when the Macy's Santa Claus refers children to other department stores for cheaper products—no one believes they could stay in business doing that!
If you want to learn more, I recommend any one of CEO Tony Hsieh's talks about customer service.
This convinced me to try it. (Where's your commission?) I guess that's the genius part, their great customer service eventually gets people to proselytize for them!