Amazon and Zappos Sitting in a Tree

by Pete Abilla on July 22, 2009

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amazon.com acquires zappos.com, tony hsieh, customer service, jeff bezos, interviewAs most you know by now, Zappos has entered into a definitive agreement with Amazon.com and will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.  This is exciting and, after speaking with my friends both at Amazon and at Zappos, they are all quite excited too.  Congratulations to Amazon, Zappos, Tony Hsieh, and Jeff Bezos 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9.

In honor of their “marriage”, I’ll repost an interview I had with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com:

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This is a 5-part series where Tony Hsieh responds to over 20 questions submitted by shmula.com blog readers.  Below is the post series:

  1. Interview Questions from shmula.com blog readers
  2. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 1
  3. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 2
  4. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 3
  5. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 4
  6. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, Part 5

Quotable from the series…

We actually have our 1-800 number on every single page of our web site because we actually want to talk to our customers and when customers talk to us for five to ten minutes we have their undivided attention and that’s really the best opportunity to brand ourselves as a company that unlike most companies, actually wants to take care of our customers.

  1. See Jeff Bezos on Kaizen ↩
  2. See Jeff Bezos on Root Cause Analysis ↩
  3. See Jeff Bezos on Lean Thinking ↩
  4. See Jeff Bezos on Taiichi Ohno ↩
  5. See Jeff Bezos on the Fallacy of the Long Tail ↩
  6. See Amazon.com on Loyalty ↩
  7. See Amazon.com and Working Backwards ↩
  8. See Jeff Bezos on Six Sigma ↩
  9. See Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com, Customer Obsession ↩

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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }

shmula July 22, 2009 at 9:13 pm

i have officially coined the term “amazappos” http://is.gd/1ImJZ

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

shmula July 22, 2009 at 10:08 pm

blog post: Amazon and Zappos Sitting in a Tree http://tr.im/tCWT

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

ericlandes July 24, 2009 at 7:14 am

Great quotes from leader of zappos on company culture. via shmula Zappos actually wants to talk to customers! http://bit.ly/Kc0wr #lean

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

shmula July 24, 2009 at 6:19 pm

blog post: Amazon and Zappos Sitting in a Tree http://tr.im/tCWT

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

Karen Wilhelm July 27, 2009 at 7:14 am

I just have this feeling I should cry. Amazon has an incomparable selection, plus good automation. But customer service is too impersonal. The Amazon small publisher supplier experience is not good.

Will Zappos lose their personality, and customer Wow! experience? Tony Hsieh even answered my question in Shmula’s interview. It’s like he’s my friend now.

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