Alfred Lin, COO, CFO and Chairman of Zappos.com spoke Thursday Oct. 16, at Oregon State University. When @brampitoyo and @mulderc and I got there, the entire auditorium was filled to the brim with college student. Everyone in the room was focused and intent on hearing what Alfred had to say. He spoke quietly and calmly, and his words were very engaging.

In less than ten years, Zappos.com has matured from an upstart to the top Internet shoe seller that is forecasted to generate $1 billion in gross merchandise sales in 2008. The e-tailer stocks 3 million pairs of shoes, handbags, apparel, and accessories, specializing in some 1,000 brands that are difficult to find in mainstream shopping malls.

Using an interactive Q&A format, Alfred discussed the ingredients to building a brand, culture, and company that matters. He shared the lessons he learned while growing the business over the last decade as well as key insights on e-commerce and entrepreneurship.

Transcript:

Consider Yourself Lucky

He talked about a study that was done with a set of people who considered themselves lucky vs. a set of people who considered themselves unlucky. Each set was asked to count the number of images present in a given newspaper. All over

Company Culture

At some point, we had more new people at the company than we had original employees. Our challenge was to train the new employees to understand and become excited about and believe in the corporate culture.

A financial officer in the company must be able to translate what’s happening in the company to other members

Q: Was it difficult to get brands like Versace to sign onto Zappos, and do you find it easier to get brands to sign on as you get more press and success?

Alfred: It’s never easier. It took us three years to get Nike. Once we got them, the CEO’s hands were shaking so much it was difficult for him to write the E-mail to the team about it.

Entrepreneurship

I don’t recommend becoming an entrepreneur. Do not underestimate the work it takes to become one. Your company will go through rough times and good times, but it is becoming harder and harder to be one.

Competitors

90-93% of commerce is done offline, so we do not have a lot of the competition traditional companies have.

On Company Growth

As a company grows, you’re not going to be able to do everything yourself. You have to begin relying on your team.
And a lot of times you have to look at your team and see who does the most and who does the least.

Teams can accomplish a lot more than indivudals. When your team succeeds, you succeed, and when your team fails, you fail. It’s important to create

Retail Stores and Catalog Business

Retail stores are not as scalable as opening up another website. But we have a type of catalog that has fashion advice and other tips.

I think business is why you do it. It’s rewarding and tiring at the same time. I equate the high I get from working on a business to a drug.

He said he wishes he could spend more time with his significant other, but he doesn’t really regret any of the choices he’s made in his life.

The toughest decision he ever had to make is letting his friends go if he’s hired them.

The best day of his career when he joined Zappos on the first day, because he felt very welcomed by the corporate culture.

Tracking and Marketing Tools

We evolved our website over the past 9 years mostly by A/B testing.

We have a new website ( http://zeta.zappos.com ) that we just rolled out, but that website does not convert as well as something that’s evolved for the past 9 years. It’s not that hard to have url A and url B and test the two.

Hiring Zappos Employees

We look for passion and a belief in the company culture over an applicant that has skill but is looking for another job.

The reason we started out training process is that we had to train people because we work and think differently. We had to think about how to not only teach the culture but improve it with each new group that came in.

We think of customers as investments, and that’s why customer

We view our interaction experiences with our customers as a branding experience. We take undivided time to

Recommended Business Books

Peruse growth and learning. We have a library in the lobby and some books are required reading for advancement inside the company.

Good to Great
Peak . Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs.

Management Strategies

I don’t have an overall strategy.I don’t do voice mails. All of them work if you stick to it. Pick a framework and work with it. We’re a very E-mail intensive company. And we expect people to answer an E-mail quickly or in a specific way.

We offer every employee $2000 if they leave. And if it’s not working, they can leave. It’s a good way to test loyalty, and supporting a person if it’s not working out.

Zappos Culture Book

Each employee contributes a paragraph about the culture of Zappos to a book that is added to continually. Except for small grammatical formatting, the book is largely unedited. The bad is left in with the good, and it is an excellent way to introduce others into the culture of the company.

We made money.zappos.com and twitter.zappos.com because of the passions of these different groups.

Zappos.com is one of the few companies who aggregates their Twitter data.

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Alfred Lin is responsible for all financial, administrative, and warehouse operations of Zappos.com. Since 2005, he has brought focus, strategy, and financial discipline to help grow the business efficiently and profitably.

Building a Brand that Matters is part of The Dean’s Distinguished Lecture Series at Oregon State University. More information is available on Oregon State University’s Business Website.

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic

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Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo, wherein Derrek Wayne kindly contributed a fifteen-second introduction piece.

Our second episode features Nate Angell or @xolotl, a name that’s hard to remember completely, but one that we will always remember. There’s development talk later as he demonstrates his shiny, new iPhone app called iToony.

But first, we chatted about Drupal for large organizations and the relative livability of various European cities—all accompanied by extremely loud (but pleasant) French songs, one of which may or may not be a rendition of Cole Porter’s Night And Day.

The image Nate made of Bram Pitoyo using the iToony app is here.

Click to Subscribe

Aside from developers, visitors will be accessing your site to learn about your product, or to download/demo it, because they were referred to it from another source.  The second type of user is here to grab the app, install it, and fly out.

Never make your users search for a demo or dowload button. Lead them through the steps they should be taking to get to the information they need.

Developers who come to your site will tolerate small links to source code, but the average visitor will not. If they have issues with the app, they’ll run back for support. Make sure they can find it! If not, they’ll try looking for help from other sources such as blogs and forums. If you provide a support forum, they’ll be more likely to stay on your page while looking for help, and you’ll be able to better understand your users through their comments.

Provide an experience flow that gives the user immediate direction from the first step onto the page. A series of later steps that are given to the user exactly when needed. It should be fun for them - as easy as a dot-to-dot. At the end, they should have a clear picture of the services your product gives, or they should have already downloaded and begun to use it. The user should not see or care about step two until step one has been completed.

Case Study: PicLens Firefox Plugin Landing Page.

With dark grey backgrounds, and cheery, pastel colors, this site has great readability. Yellow (the natural color of attention) used sparingly, and with extreme care. Grey is neutral, much better than black. Light blue could be <h3>, pink <h2>, and yellow <h1>. The download button is light blue, massive, and somewhat three dimensional, allowing it to pop right out of the page. It’s like oil painting with attention.

The website knows that the user has Firefox installed, and that Firefox’s pop-up blocker script will interrupt the download process. PicLens handles this issue brilliantly by drawing the user to the top of the screen with a trip of text with a  yellow background to direct the user’s attention to the problem area, and how to solve it.

Overall, the website is arranged like a good piece of art. The focal point is chosen to be the Firefox logo, then the install, and then the Demo. Everything runs 1-2-3. Just like a dot-to-dot. I had a great user experience while installing the program, and I enjoyed using it. Kudos to the B2C team that created the PicLens page.

04.14.2008 by LukeW

Eric Reiss’ E-service: What we can learn from the customer-service gurus presentation at IA Summit 2008 walked through examples of bad customer service in action and presented strategies for avoiding similar pitfalls.

* Service is 100% about user experience. User experience is not 100% about service.
* Companies with an 83% satisfaction are in trouble. Need 90% satisfaction for long-term customer loyalty.
* Service management is a process not a program. Goes on for a long time with no finish line.
* Unhappy customers are dangerous. If you have a good experience you will tell three friends. If you are an unhappy customer, you will tell 17 people.
* Service happens at the moment of experience. Moments of truth are when and where people have customer service.
* Service is an intangible event that helps us achieve something.
* 10 reasons services are tougher to manage than products:
* Produced at the moment of delivery
* Cannot be recalled if sucks
* Experience cannot be sold or passed on
* Product cannot be demonstrated. You cannot send a sample.
* Cannot be centrally produced, inspected, or warehoused.
* Quality assurance needs to happen before production
* Help, Enhance, Fix –three ways to provide service
* If we do not demand good service, we will never receive it.
* Don’t just prevent bad things from happening. Educate people that it is not prevention, but also making wonderful things happen.

IA Summit: Re-experiencing information
04.14.2008 by LukeW

At the 2008 IA Summit, Lucas Pettinati presented some of his learning’s redesigning the Yahoo! registration process in his Re-experiencing information: Dealing with user-submitted data talk.

* What is the context for registration? People want instant gratification. It’s fairly easy to switch providers –low barriers to entry for online services. People will lie to protect their identity. Remembering account details is difficult.
* In order to establish an effective design, need to embrace user needs & leverage their natural behavior
* Different structures for user registration. Pre: needs unique identifier. Post: encourages return transactions. Immersive: promotes usage. Part of the way you use the product.
* Connecting with the user: build trust so can get factual data within the system
* Error & help text: fun, approachable angle to ease people into it
* Only ask necessary questions
* Only need unique identifier for communication: aol, gmail, etc.
* Banking & Finance: needs identifier for increased security
* Commerce: no meaningful ID needed for commercial transactions
* If going to use a unique identifier, make it easy for people. Use email or a common ID method for registration if you do not need a unique identifier
* Respect your user’s locale: get message to international users that a localized version of site content is available.
* Use CAPTCHA wisely: Provide audio version for the visually impaired, allow user to request a different image, Use CAPTCHA to protect commodities like usernames
* Online circle of life: register, user, forget account information
* Build a relationship prior to or with registration
* Be personable: use humor if appropriate
* Explain the value of questions if they may be seen as out of context
* Use an immersive registration process when possible

Account recovery mechanisms

* Email: quickest, assumes people have control over email
* Challenge/response model: prone to repeated errors because people lie, works best when information is up to date
* Forensic: confirms account activity and details in order to reset password: verifies actions only known by the account owner, safest method, most difficult to implement
* Email recovery: put the user in the control. Need to ask for email address from user. Confirm where it is sending
* Challenge/recovery questions change over time.
* Users want to retain privacy and may be worried about ID theft
* Put the user in control of account recovery
* Remind users that their account may contain old information
* Use human support when possible