Zappos is Dead?

ZapposIsDeadI took some liberties with one of Robert Scoble’s pictures

It’s ironic that one of the stated rationales for Amazon purchasing Zappos was for their corporate culture. Such a purchase will ultimately result in the end of Zappos’ independent identity and with it any resemblance to the culture it once had. The real reason I suspect Amazon purchased Zappos is to cheaply remove a future competitor. Yeah, I just said $900,000,000 was cheap. To own internet sales in the US a little longer, it’s probably worth a lot more to Amazon.

I have little doubt that Zappos would have continued to grow in strength and become a real force within the internet sales business. They had something unique and wonderful going on, and unfortunately I can’t imagine how that can survive when your only shareholder is the 800lb gorilla of internet sales, Amazon. I’d really like to be proven wrong on this hypothesis.

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  • http://twitter.com/Vukicevic Vladimir Vukicevic

    It seems to me that if Amazon would have taken half the money it used to buy Zappos and invested it into internal development and evolution, that Amazon could have achieved similar results. What they really bought was the right to kill (assimilate) a major growing competitor.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    The tried something internally in the shoe market, endless.com but it couldn't compete with Zappos. And Zappos was gaining steam with all the free PR/Marketing. I don't think they'll just pull the plug on Zappos, but they'll definitely mold it into the bigger Amazon solution. It's business so I can't fault them, but I'm a little disheartened because I wanted to see more competition in the online sales space, as well as affiliate marketing.

  • http://vukicevic.blogspot.com/ Vladimir Vukicevic

    It seems to me that if Amazon would have taken half the money it used to buy Zappos and invested it into internal development and evolution, that Amazon could have achieved similar results. What they really bought was the right to kill (assimilate) a major growing competitor.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    They tried something internally in the shoe market, endless.com but it couldn't compete with Zappos. And Zappos was gaining steam with all the free PR/Marketing. I don't think they'll just pull the plug on Zappos, but they'll definitely mold it into the bigger Amazon solution. It's business so I can't fault them, but I'm a little disheartened because I wanted to see more competition in the online sales space, as well as affiliate marketing.

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