Online sales of Shoes alone is a 4.5 BILLION dollar industry and Zappos is one of the leaders.

With almost 5 million visitors a month zappos out scores many content driven sites and with extremely lenient return policies of up to a year with free delivery and return mail paid their customers tend to stay brand loyal.

Amazon is betting on this but Amazon is also a leader in apparel and shoes.

Not only does Amazon market under their own banner but also under endless.com which was created as a direct contender for other online clothing merchants.

So what will happen to Zappos?

Who knows but the Owner must be very happy with the price they received.

In their official Blog Zappos notified their staff :

This morning, our board approved and we signed what’s known as a “definitive agreement”, in which all of the existing shareholders and investors of Zappos (there are over 100) will be exchanging their Zappos stock for Amazon stock. Once the exchange is done, Amazon will become the only shareholder of Zappos stock.

and stated

We plan to continue to run Zappos the way we have always run Zappos — continuing to do what we believe is best for our brand, our culture, and our business. From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are switching out our current shareholders and board of directors for a new one, even though the technical legal structure may be different.

So it seems for now they will stay the same but you know how it is for any takeover. Once there is a problem that can not be resolved heads will roll and policies will change.