Online shoe giant Zappos.com recently had a $1.6 million dollar mistake due to its overly complex software. Their software caused a ‘glitch’ that ended pricing the shoes far below the intended price at its sister site, 6pm.com.
Clients thought that they were buying discount running shoes not under priced product .
This is yet another example of how easily used and intuitive user interfaces are integral to business operations in the 21st century .
CIOs and IT professionals at quickly flourishing companies know the importance of developing a quality user interface on all of its software operations. While other companies’ IT professionals are straining on timelines, integration, and security issues; the efficient IT professional realizes that these problems are secondary to developing an efficacious user interface.
Its plausible that problems like this will help to switch software growth priorities at Zappos.com, but it’s questionable if they will get the full scale of the moral. While they may fix their current software issues , it will take a alteration in their philosophy of software development for the company to go on to expand in the product-saturated 21st century.
CEO of Zappos.com Tony Hsieh stated, “We have a pricing engine that runs and sets prices according to the rules it is given by business owners. Unfortunately, the way to input new rules into the current version of our pricing engine requires near-programmer skills to manipulate, and a few symbols missed in the coding of a new rule, which resulted in items that were sold exculsively on 6pm.com to have a maximum price of $49.95.”
One of Zappos.com defining marks is its focus on customer service. It recently earned a No. 1 Ranking in a Online Customer Service from StellaService LLC , a Ratings Agency Firm in New York.
The testing included usability tests, orders and returns of products, and interactions with customer service reps over the phone, e-mail, and live chat.
Another study by StellaService LLC found that Americans are tractable to pay 10% more for bang-up customer assistance .
Another development in the industry has been the emersion of a flow toward buying discount shoes online. This trend is opposite the trend towards increased customer service that sites like Zappos.com depend on.