Tony Hsieh built his online shoe retailer into an e-commerce powerhouse. But with credit tightening and investors eyeing the exits, Hsieh was forced to ask: Was selling Zappos really the only way to save it?

Really great article I found via Dustin Curtis (@dcurtis). Amazon and Zappos essentially have polar opposite approaches to online retail.

I think one of the things I've always liked about Zappos is that they don't compete on price, and they are upfront about it.

One of the ways that Amazon tries to deliver a great customer experience is by offering low prices, whereas at Zappos we don't try to compete on price.

It seems like, in today's world, that shouldn't even be possible. And yet Zappos has managed to create value for customers in online retail in a way that no one else really has. People (including myself) will pay an extra $10 for a pair of shoes just because they know that, if they have a problem or want to make a return, it's going to be easier to do with Zappos than with any other online retailer. That's an interesting business hook and one that can't be easily copied. It's also at odds with Amazon's model. You can't write an algorithm that makes customer service more efficient. You can't price discriminate. Hell, you wouldn't even want to—it's against everything you stand for. 

I like Tony Hsieh because he didn't sent out to change the world. All he tried to do was make it a little bit better. And he did it.

Looks pretty cool, but I won't be impressed with Square unless they make good on their promise and create a payment processing platform that doesn't require you to be an authorized merchant. I can't figure out how that's possible, and why Visa, Mastercard and American Express would agree to something like this. The hardware and software really isn't that impressive, and VeriFone's PAYware Mobile has beat them to the punch.

If Square actually makes it to market it's going to be more of a triumph in finance and risk management than anything else. Hopefully they won't do something stupid like hold your money for 30-days or take a massive percentage of every sale to process the card. And hopefully credit card fraud won't increase by 1000%. Hopefully.

As you may have seen, the Google Docs blog announced a preview of the Google Checkout store gadget back in July. The Google Checkout store gadget, available in Google Labs, allows you to create an online store with inventory managed from a Google spreadsheet and payments accepted through Google Checkout.

Since then, our engineers have been exploring ways to simplify store creation. Today, we're excited to introduce a new feature for the store gadget: a wizard that streamlines the store creation process. By automating the manual steps in the original instruction guide, the new store gadget wizard should leave you with even more time to focus on your business.

As with the original release, no complicated coding or technical tasks are required, and you can get your first online store up-and-running in under five minutes. The new wizard helps you embed the store on Blogger, Google Sites, iGoogle, and other websites. We hope you'll find the new version more intuitive and enjoyable to use.

Building a website is becoming easier and easier. You don’t need to know how to program to build a website. Now you don’t even need to know how to program to build applications or online storefronts. I particularly like Google’s approach of creating web-tools based on the way non-programmers think. It says a lot about their philosophies around user experience.

Let’s say that someone wants to build an online store. They aren’t thinking about what that looks like in terms of database schema , relationships, and tables. They never really give thought to the idea of checkout flow. No, the average person thinks of their spreadsheet which contains last month’s inventory. They can’t figure out why they can’t just upload their spreadsheet and a store gets formed. Why not build a tool that actually lets users do this?

It’s easier said than done, but that’s exactly what Google has done with Docs + Checkout. This project may seem like a small one for a giant like Google, but it’s actually pretty significant what they are doing. They are making normal spreadsheets functional. They’ve also got a form creator that lets people create polls and field email addresses for newsletters. They even have samples up that allow you to create Google Maps applications with Google Docs Spreadsheets: Spreadsheets Powered Map.

It wasn’t too long ago when the only way of creating a store online was by coding something yourself, using generic software which was terrible, or spending hundreds of dollars on proprietary software that was just slightly less terrible. Now you can do pretty much everything... from a spreadsheet... for free.