What Any Catalog Success Reader Should Learn From Zappos.com

4. Make sure your Web site inventory is 100 percent accurate. Early on, Zappos didn’t have any inventory. “We’d place orders with manufacturers, and they’d get back to us that they were out of stock, and we’d have to tell customers we were out of stock, Hsieh said. “Customers would e-mail 50 friends and tell them how bad we were. As we grew, we found that even 1 percent inaccuracy of inventory was too much. We decided if we were going to be all about being about top service, we needed inventory to be 99.99 percent accurate. Our Web site is updated in real time, so anything you put in your shopping cart is in our warehouse.”