The race for the world's largest shoe store is on. In an industry that is fragmented, some e-commerce sites are lacing up to be the number one supplier of shoes. Most retailers only carry a few brands so it's a niche market with few participants. However, that is all changing as companies such as San Francisco-based Zappos.com sprints to be the top seller of shoes online.

Zappos.com already claims to be the world's largest shoe store. Zappos avoids storage costs by having manufacturers ship shoes direct to buyers. Zappos carries a large selection of shoes for men and women - dress shoes, casual wear and some athletic brands, accessible via the site' search engine. You can also select by size and width.

Founder Nick Swinmurn created the company last June after searching for a pair of shoes on and off line. He cruised malls and shoe sites looking for the style he wanted in his size without much success. But as the former Autoweb employee continued searching, an idea began forming.

"Online, I found a lot personal home pages for small independent shoe store," says Swinmurn. "There was no one place as a source for every style and every brand out there."

Swinmurn did some research and found that footwear is a $40 billion industry annually in the U.S. But more importantly he discovered that mail order was the fastest growing distribution channel - growing around 5% each year. In fact, a recent Jupiter Communications report shows online consumer spending for footwear growing to $3 billion by 2001.

"Every brand has 50 to 100 shoe styles", says Swinmurn. "But if you go into a local shoe store you've got 5 to 10 styles on display. So, the stores really only have 5% of a particular product line on exhibit. Most of the styles reflect what the local shoe buyer liked, so there is no consistency among stores."

Because Swinmurn was a novice to the retail shoe biz, he hired experienced professionals from Nordstrom's department store for his management team to build credibility as a serious online contender. They used their industry contacts to get shoe manufactures to work with Zappos.

"We knew the reason there wasn't already a store with everything out there, was because stores off line are usually limited by stockrooms or warehouses, adds Swinmurn. "So we knew the only way to do it was to get the manufacturers to ship directly to the customer, and that's what we did."

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Don't expect to find many bargains at the Zappos site because the company sells at retail. (Though the prices do include shipping and sales tax). The main advantage is the wide-ranging, searchable selections and the convenience of shopping from your PC. In fact, you could save yourself a lot of walking around buying shoes online.