Amazon launches Endless.com, a shoe and handbag exclusive web store

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Amazon this week have announced the launch of Endless.com, an exclusive shoe and handbag web site. The biggest upside, Endless.com offers a FREE overnight or next business day shipping on all of its items. While this might be a promotional event, Amazon is heavily promoting this free next day shipping enough to make it a permanent feature. Endless.com’s motto: Destination for great styles, the best prices and fast delivery.

At Endless.com, you can shop by style, brand, size, or color family; make multiple selections and clear the results you don’t want to see. Endless.com provides detailed product descriptions including construction materials, heel height and customer reviews to help you make the right choice as well as a zoom feature that allows customers to see all product details, whether it’s a subtle pattern or a not-so-subtle texture. On a budget? You can use their price slider to filter to results in your range. If you have a question on how a style fits, you can bounce over to their Customer Fit Ratings and read what other shoppers had to say about their purchase. Other upsides of shopping at Endless.com include Free return shipping for a period of 365 days from the original purchase date and also offer price match or refund of 110% of the difference if you find another shopping destination offering lower price for the same product thus offering their customers a no-risk opportunity to try them out. For details and timelines on free overnight shipping, customers can reference the countdown clock on the top of every page, which lets them know what their order deadlines and delivery dates will be.

Amazon and Endless.com association.

If you shop at Endless, you will rarely see any association with Amazon.com as pointed out at TechCrunch and you have to dig into their ‘About Us‘ page to finally see their association with Amazon. This page points out that Amazon wanted to build an exclusive web store dedicated to shoes and handbags. The only Amazon associations you will encounter are that all the images are stored on Amazon’s servers and when you are done shopping and set to make a purchase, you need to register or log in with your Amazon account information.

Comparison of Endless.com and Like.com

While Endless provides an enhanced browsing and shopping experience for shoe and handbag buying, they still have a lot to go before they end up catching with Like.com. We profiled Like.com earlier, Riya’s visual search engine which allows you to search for items by their appearance rather than just text. We believe that similar to like.com, Endless.com is trying to target the niche audience of women and their love for shoes and handbags, products which together constitute a $30 Billion online market. Like.com launched with about 200 merchants and about 2 million unique products. Currently, Endless.com offers around 250 merchant brands.

In their promotion of Endless.com, Amazon says

” If a customer would like to conduct a search for gold and red ballet flats by Jessica Simpson, Steve Madden and BCBGirls in a size 8 and an 8.5, or conduct a different search for men’s oxfords by Bruno Magli and Kenneth Cole in size 11 within a certain price range, they can.”

So, let us search for “red ballet flats” on both Endless.com and Like.com. A selection of the first product item through the search results show us the following pages.

Result # 1: Shopping on Endless.com

Endless upon selection of the item displays a scroll menu of the other search results shown in the previous page on the top. We are then shown a frontal picture of the product along with thumbnails of other pictures below. We are also given the option to select Color, size and width of the shoe which is followed by more details of the product selected.

Result # 2: Shopping on Like.com

Like.com on the other hand provides a more richer shopping experience since you can further customize your selections by Color, shape and pattern. You can choose your color and also select a price range. If you like any particle feature of the product you just selected like say the heel of the shoe, you can select the heel and like.com searches its inventory looking for shoes with similar type heels all the time keeping your previous product preferences intact.

When like.com was launched, a majority of their products came through Amazon. Now, with the launch of Amazon’s own Endless.com, it will be interesting to see if they can cut into like.com’s product base and supply. We at Skunklabs think that Amazon would continue to provide like with products, only keep some exclusive offerings or promotions to their internal store.

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