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Aug 08,2009 Juno Ecommerce

Amazon Gets a Freebie with Zappos Acquisition

Amazon hit the jackpot when it acquired electronic commerce company Zappos for $940 million in a stock and cash deal. With the acquisition, Amazon got a little giveaway, the Clothes.com domain.  It appears that Zappos bought the domain last year for $4.9 million.

Zappos acquired Clothes.com from IdeaLab as shown in SEC records. The purchase was made in May 2008. The domain is currently redirecting a Zappos web page seling clothing products.

Clothes.com was the second-highest domain bid last year. The sale never made news proving that a lot of major domain acquisitions go off the radar each year. However, it also shows that top brass companies consider generic domain names in increasing their sales and supporting their brands.

The launching of Zappos in 1999 made way to a major breakthrough in the web industry. The firm became the top online store during its peak, back when eBay and Amazon were still struggling online auction sites. Zappos became the number one seller of shoes online by putting emphasis on customer service.

Experts have been wondering why Amazon, a master of online product distribution, would shell out close to a billion dollars for Zappos. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos named a few major reasons why Zappos is worth the buy. For one, Zappos kept customer obsession over the years. Bezos also pointed the unique culture and the future that awaits Zappos. The site has a lot of growth potential. It has a unique culture that no company could easily replicate. Zappos is also known for its legendary customer service. Amazon is buying Zappos for its people and probably not for anything else.

Another very intriguing fact about Zappos is how it managed to cover all the bases in brand category pages. The site had perfect SEO techniques that only a few other auction sites could knock off. Zappos focused on keyword density by a including a paragraph about each brand with customer reviews in it.

With Amazon’s new venture, we may expect to see skyrocketing growth within the site over the next few months.