Endless.com, the online shoe store launched by Amazon before they acquired Zappos, is rolling out free international shipping on orders over $100 for more than 50 countries. {TechCrunch} International orders under $100 ship for a flat rate of $10. Australia, Canada most of the European Union (France, Germany, etc.), Mexico, China, Japan and the UAE are just a few of the countries included.

Even though Zappos is officially part of the Amazon empire now, it’s good to see that both sites are continuing to innovate. For Zappos, that’s meant expanding their product offering to include apparel and homeware, while pulling out of Canada to focus exclusively on the US market.

Endless clearly has different ideas about non-US shoe shoppers, and seemingly thinks international sales are an area that can be profitable. On the help page detailing the shipping options, we learn that purchases will go through the Amazon Global program that estimates and collects an import fees deposit at checkout.

For US readers who’ve never had the pleasure of dealing with customs fees and duties this may not sound like a big deal, but here’s why it is: though it seems antiquated in the age of the internet and online shopping which is supposed to break down borders, the taxes, duties and import fees on an item can sometimes cost as much or more than the item itself. We’re not talking some remote country you’ve never heard of either; from personal experience the UK and France can levy some heavy duty duties on everything from Forever 21 tank tops (cheap products) to higher priced luxury items sent from stores outside the EU.

It may just be dumb luck, but in our experience it doesn’t seem to work the other way, and that must-have dress you spot on a UK site never arrives with any costs beyond the exchange rate and shipping.

So while shipping costs are only part of the problem, by making that free Endless can slightly reduce some of the burden on international shoppers looking to take advantage of lower US$ pricing and wider selection than what’s available on domestic sites. By working those fees into the checkout process from the beginning, international shoppers won’t have to worry about spending $100 on a pair of shoes to find out that they have to pay $80 in import fees.

Interestingly, Endless has a sister brand called Javari that operates sites in the UK, France, Germany and Japan. The selection on those sites is much smaller than the US site, so the new shipping offer could find its way on to the localized sites as a cross promotion.

The Seattle online retailer announced plans to relaunch their online clothing and shoe business with a focus on the high end market.  Amazon already owns Shopbop, which carries hot, mid-range designer labels like Elizabeth and James, Marc by Marc Jacobs, Diane von Furstenberg, Alexander Wang, and KORS by Michael Kors among others. Recently acquired Zappos, which started by selling shoes online (see our picks for on trend Zappos shoes under $100), also carries clothing now – specifically, some of the same secondary designer lines.

You may remember from our infographic of where the wealthy shop online, that Zappos reaches more  shoppers in the $100,000/year household income category than sites for Neiman Marcus or Saks Fifth Avenue combined.

While it’s difficult to break out traffic to the apparel section of Amazon’s site specifically, Scot Wingo of ChannelAdvisor, a company that helps 3rd party sellers on Amazon and eBay, estimates clothing, shoe and accessory sales at Amazon.com to be anywhere from one-third to one-fourth of Amazon’s total $24.5 billion in sales. {Financial Times} There’s no word on if that includes sales from Endless.com, the separately branded shoe and handbag store the company launched in 2007.

The move comes after eBay revamped their fashion offerings to better compete with member sale sites like Gilt and Rue La La. eBay fashion now includes sample sales, a capsule collection from Narcisco Rodriguez similar to the type of pairing that H&M and Target have made popular, and a sleek new wrapper on the site to house it all.

With a focus on the holiday season, Amazon will use the data they’ve gathered up until October to enhance the user experience from selection to close of sale. Lest anyone underestimate the significance of this, Amazon’s tracking and testing of things as small as the color of buttons, or 3 or 4 words of text on a page, are part of what’s contributed to a 12.8% conversion rate, while industry norms are around 4.9% (and 2-3% isn’t unheard of as a normal rate of people who purchase, compared to people who visit). {ClickZ}

And it’s all of those things that should shake fashion technophobes, who are still indecisive about a serious commitment to online retail. While  companies like Zara and H&M are tepid in their response to the growing necessity of online shopping, at least they’ve started. They may also be prime candidates to partner with Amazon – for years, Amazon handled Target’s online operations, so suffice it to say they know a thing or two about handling large amounts of rapidly moving inventory.

No, the people who should really be afraid are the labels which will wait so long to get into e-commerce, or respond to the trends within it that are emerging, that re-capturing the attention of shoppers who’ve stopped checking back to see if they’ve joined the 21st century will be even more costly and require more effort than if they’d bitten the bullet and just done something. While the Net-a-Porters and Gilts of the world are pushing the online shopping experience to mobile devices and beyond, they’ll still be playing catch up for pushing splash pages and clunky flash intros.

Offline retail will never die, but consumers have decided that the experience they want isn’t always in a store. To the retailers and brands still weighing their online options: when companies that have built their billions catering to that shift decide to focus on your customer, you don’t have long to decide.

If there are two shoe trends that every designer has jumped on, they would be beige heels and a kind of weird, but kind of cool sandal/boot hybrid. Beyond the heels, which obviously give you a lift, the lighter color of the beige heels supposedly gives legs an extra bit of length.

Now when it comes to the sandal boots, we aren’t quite sure what the inspirations is – cold ankles, perhaps? But scrolling through shoes recently, it’s been impossible to escape this new style of shoe. Maybe it’s a compromise for those people who refuse to stop wearing their flip-flops after summer’s over, maybe there are people who love boots and sandals too much to choose, but whatever the case, we’ve rounded up 9 of the best styles we found for each trend under $100.

Mouse over for brand and price, click on the shoe image to buy.

Want to know where the wealthy shop online in the UK? Visit Signature9 UK for a look at the UK shopping sites popular with high earners.

It’s impossible to break out apparel shoppers for department store sites (many of which also sell home and garden items), so it should be noted than not every visitor browsing macys.com is there for clothing, beauty or jewelry items. But even if half of the visitors are there for dresses instead of dishes, Macy’s is attracting one of the largest (and richest) online shopping audiences.

Our data is from Google’s Ad Planner, which only offers visitor and demographic information going back one year. We can’t say if the economy has played a role in shifting online shopping preferences, but presently, wealthy online shoppers aren’t visiting luxury destinations in the same volume as they visit e-commerce sites with mid-level pricing. A possible silver lining for sites specializing in luxury sales: while they may not get the same volume of traffic, it’s quite possible that high end e-commerce sites earn more per sale and visitor.

Of the top 20 apparel e-commerce sites attracting the largest number of wealthy online shoppers, 6 (30%) are sites specializing in discount sales. Gilt and Rue La La are neck and neck for the title of the invitation sale site with the wealthiest visitors. Allowing for a small sampling error, the two sites could even reach the same number of wealthy visitors. The advantage, however, goes to Gilt Groupe, who attracts a combined 1.2 million visitors across the main Gilt site, and recently launched sister (and brother) sites Gilt Fuse and Gilt Man. Combined, Gilt Groupe attracts more visitors earning $100,000 or more than any other online only e-commerce apparel site besides Zappos. Pretty impressive for a company that’s not even 3 years old.

When it comes to visitors earning $100k or more per year, invitation sale sites may not have as many visitors as department stores, but as a percentage of visitors, a sizable portion are in this desirable online shopper demographic.

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