October 25 2007

Amazon quietly launches shoes

Amazon UK has started selling shoes.

Not sure why we missed this, but since the beginning of October Amazon has had a Shoe Store.

We'd been hoping for more of a "wow" launch for shoes, ever since we fell in love with Endless.com - one of the nicest retailing interfaces we've come across. Endless sells shoes and it takes a while (and a ferret through the small print) to realise that it's owned by Amazon.

We'd expected that this was a 'trial' of a new, improved interface that would in time be reversed into the main Amazon site, but it seems as if the UK site has remained largely with the flat Amazon look that we know and don't love.

There are some nice ajaxy improvements, and nice retailing touches (like being able to see all size and colour options for each shoe at a glance), but the ground hasn't moved for us immediately.

With Amazon branching into more non-media areas (see the "Baby beta" too) we're interested to see how long they can stay with the 'one template sells all' approach. Consistency is certainly beneficial, but is there not a benefit in specialist presentation for certain categories?

by Ian Jindal