Fashion Merchandising: More customer reviews, more product information, fewer returns for online shoe stores

Fashion merchandising news: Sales of shoes online are booming and this is no secret. Competitors have sprung up to seize Zappos.com's crown: Shoebuy.com, Endless.com (belongs to Amazon.com), Piperlime.com (belongs to Gap Inc.), and even Yahoo Shopping are in the aisles.

The Washington Times has a detailed articles about the trend, I recommend you read the article. There are 2 things that I took note of:

- Shoes is the number 2 item searched for in the Yahoo! Shopping pages, behind the Nintendo Wii

- Online shoe retailers say that adding detailed product description, better product pictures, and customer reviews can lead to decreasing product returns (yet, a retailer says that it now down to 25%, which is stil a lot to me).

Improving fashion merchandising on a website can thus lead to fewer returns and better financials.