How did the competitor Zappos leave the field?

In the startup environment, it is a habit to talk about successes to keep our hopes alive for the future, but it is a big mistake to forget the failures of the past and not benefit from the experiences of the past. For this purpose, the Ecomotive team has collected the experiences of a series of failed startups, so that reviewing their failed stories may be a basis for the success of new startups in Iran’s startup community. This collection will be published and made available to the audience in the form of the story of failure. We review the second part of this series, which deals with the failure of the Shoes.com startup.

Shoeme.ca was born from the collaboration of Sean Clark and Roger Hardy, to be a solution for the delivery of shoes that were ordered online. In July 2014, Hardy Investments acquired the Vancouver-based site, along with Seattle-based OnlineShoes.com, from Brown Shoe. After buying and adding the Shoes.com domain to this collection, the company assumed the new name of Shoes.com.

On May 20, 2014, the net income of the company reached about 45 million dollars. Shoes.com had more than 250 employees across North America, $200 million in annual revenue, and 8 million customers across the US and Canada. In May 2015, the company was valued at $320 million and headquartered in Vancouver.

But Shoes.com is a strong competitor like Zappos It offered unique services to its customers, such as free delivery and withdrawal of goods, 24-hour customer service without waiting time, wide selections, algorithms that suggested similar products, etc. Services that happened to be either non-existent or poorly provided due to Hardy & Clark’s inexperience in the field of fashion and the rawness of the company’s purchasing tools. Dissatisfaction and customer complaints about the delivery of wrong orders and the lack of proper service to respond to them were among the weaknesses of Shoes.com in this field.

On the other hand, one of the company’s strategic mistakes was operating in Canada, so that even Zappos, as the main competitor of this company, was not willing to work in Canada, because it is difficult to set up a profitable business in this country, especially the transportation costs in this vast and sparsely populated country. , is very high. In fact, services such as free delivery or pick-up in Canada are a huge financial loss for any company. The combination of these reasons somehow caused the company to reach the end of its path.

On January 27, 2017, it was announced that Shoes.com was shutting down. In early February, the company filed for bankruptcy amid heavy debt and large customers that it was unclear whether it would be able to meet their orders.

In the coming days, we will share more startup failure stories with you. Failures that the right look at them can provide the basis for our success!