Zappos.com director of development: Brent Cromley

Dan Farber: Brent, thanks for joining me.

Brent Cromley: Thank you for having me here.

Dan Farber: Now Zappos.com I've known since 1999 when it started, I bought a few pairs of shoes from there but you've really expanded out from that base of being a shoe store. Can you tell us a little bit more of what Zappos.com does today?

Brent Cromley: Absolutely, well, for or customers we started out as you said on shoes and we've expanded on to apparel, eyewear, accessories, we've even started to branch out into electronics and home cookware. But really at its heart Zappos.com is a customer service company focused company, we think of ourselves first and foremost as that so anywhere we can basically provide excellent customer service, that's where we can be strong and provide value to the customers.

Dan Farber: Now I know one of the core values for the company is to create what you call a "wow experience" for the customer and I don't know how many orders you have per day but how do you use IT to enhance that customer experience?

Brent Cromley: Absolutely, well the idea of the "wow experience" is to surprise the customer to make him think that we're going above and beyond what you'd normally expect from a company. So we advertise free shipping to all our customers but what we'll do is automatically upgrade them to free overnight shipping and once they've placed their order we'll send them an email saying "guess what, we've upgraded you to overnight shipping and that gives that little bit of "wow factor" that you mentioned. Our operations are located in Kentucky so that we can easily get packages to the customers overnight. We've really streamlined that part of our fulfillment system to really facilitate that wow factor.

Dan Farber: Now it seems that you're going to be very dependent on the experience people have on the website, and what are you doing to make sure that that website can deliver in terms of the load times in terms of the uptime.

Brent Cromley: A lot of the focus of the IT organization is to make sure that the uptime, first off that the user experience is seamless, that when they come to the site they're easily able to find the products they're looking for, that they're easily able to go through the checkout process, it's not confusing so a lot of work is done on the user experience side to make that easy. But then on the backend, we have scaled our operations vertically so that we have different components essentially providing customer recommendations, check-out and we really spend a lot of effort to make sure those scale well and that the customer response time is very high. And I think the results we get form our published weekly performance results are very high for Zappos.com.

Dan Farber: So what do you consider to be a good response time for a web page?

Brent Cromley: We believe that the page should load within less than a second for the customer.

Dan Farber: And you've seen results from studies that show that if you hit those load times that you'll have an increase, I guess you wouldn't have as much cart abandonment.

Brent Cromley: Right, we want to replicate the experience that a customer is going to have in a store, walking from product to product. There shouldn't be any lag or any delays as they want to go to another aisle and search for another set or category of product. So we want to make sure that it's the same experience that you'd get in a store and so that require very fast response time.

Dan Farber: Let me ask you about the warehouse itself, obviously it's supply chain management, inventory management. What do you do to optimize in terms of the value you can bring to the business from the backend systems?

Brent Cromley: Well, our inventory system in our warehouse is what we call "random put-away". We don't try to align products together. What we do is when we put away product as they come into the warehouse we just pick any random location and put that product there. Our inventory management system is able to track the location of every product at every point in time so when it comes time to pick the product, the customer places the order; a person will walk around the warehouse, find the closest, we have some algorithms to determine the closest product to their proximity, find that and put that on the conveyor system. So we've really done a lot of work to make that as efficient as possible and make sure that we can get the product as quickly as possible on the truck shipping out to the customer.

Dan Farber: Now from a business intelligence point of view, what are you doing to promote certain products or understand the trends that are going on in the buyers' habits so that you can obviously generate more revenue?

Brent Cromley: We have some recommended products we have some featured products of the day, but we really believe that what we want to do is make, a lot of times when a customer will come in, they're looking for a type of product or a particular item, and we just want to make that as easy as possible so the navigation of the site to get them to the set of products or individual product that they're looking for is the most important.

Dan Farber: Now I understand that you recently started up a Twitter for Zappos.com. Are you using a lot of these so called web 2.0 technologies internally and externally?

Brent Cromley: Both externally and internally. Internally we use an open source IRC channel for communication amongst all our different offices. We have an open source blogging solution for people to put thoughts and comments on particular technology issues. Externally, we're about to launch a twitter.Zappos.com.com taking advantage of some of the new technologies that are being developed and allows customers to look and see what people are saying about Zappos.com on twitter. One of the big areas that we're going to be investing in this next year is the community or online social space and so there'll be a number of applications that we're going to be launching in that area.

Dan Farber: Can you give me an example of what you might do in the social software space?

Brent Cromley: Well we've launched one Facebook application. We'd really like to develop a community around the Zappos.com customer base, we want to make it less of just a shopping experience but a destination where they can come and share ideas about the products that we sell. And make it much more of a destination than just an e-commerce site.

Dan Farber: So if there are people who are fanatical about shoes, they can come there and discuss shoes and give recommendations to the brands.

Brent Cromley: Absolutely, and maybe share lists amongst people and really just make it much more of a social network experience.

Dan Farber: So people who bought this also bought that?

Brent Cromley: Exactly.

Dan Farber: Now Zappos.com has been around since 1999, and I know that the user interface evolves, but do you have any big plans to kind of revise it based on all the learning you've had?

Brent Cromley: Absolutely, well you know originally the Zappos.com technology, the Zappos.com website was built around primarily shoes. And as we've expanded out into these new categories, it's gotten more and more difficult to innovate. So we've actually been in the process of rewriting the entire website and we're going to be launching that new version in the next couple of months and it will sit alongside the classic Zappos.com website and hopefully take over the entire site within the next 3 to 6 months.

Dan Farber: Are there some technologies you're applying that will make it much easier to use?

Brent Cromley: Yeah, originally we had used our own search engine that we'd written internally, but now we're using an open source search, the Solar Lucene technology stack. And we've moved from PERL as well to Java and taken advantage of a lot of the Java open source projects that we have out there.

Dan Farber: Now finally, you're doing shoes and handbags and eyewear and a few other categories, I think you just added cookware. What else could you stamp out given that it seems that you have the infrastructure just to do any category of product?

Brent Cromley: Right, well we've had customers write in and suggest to us that we run an airline, or actually we've had one customer suggest that we take over the IRS. Right now we sell primarily shoes and apparel and some of the other categories that I mentioned, but 10 years from now the sky's the limit. We really think that wherever we can apply good customer service, that's some place where Zappos.com will be interested in moving into.

Dan Farber: Well Brent, thanks so much for talking with me.

Brent Cromley: Thank you very much, thank you for having me.

Dan Farber: I've been speaking with Brent Cromley who is the director of development for Zappos.com.com. For CIO Sessions I'm Dan Farber, thanks for watching.