Retailers offer apps with a catalogue feel

Mia Sara, 43, a Manhattan transplant in Los Angeles, misses window shopping in New York, but has found a replacement — shopping on her iPad. “It’s a reasonable facsimile of doing a little window shopping and maybe you stop in somewhere and get something that piques your fancy,” she said, like the blue silk Phillip Lim blouse she recently bought on the Net-a-Porter.com iPad app.

Shopping on the iPad is more convenient than using her laptop in bed, Sara said, and easier than scrolling through tiny images on her phone while waiting in the car for her children.

Shopping, as old-timers may remember, was once fun.

Then Google came along, and afternoons spent wandering past store windows, or flipping through catalogues, were often condensed into two-minute searches for “jeans 32 waist dark wash-bootcut-stretch city fit”

Now, though, retailers like Net-a-Porter think they have found a way to give online shopping more of the feel of an outing at the mall or an hour with a catalogue — by creating apps that resemble magazines for tablet computers. Just as magazine publishers are producing iPad apps that mimic print in a way they never could on ordinary websites, retailers are making iPad catalogues, with big, stylised photographs that users can flip through on the couch or in bed. And also like magazine publishers, they are adding rich features like video, sound and 3-D views.

Though most retailers started with the iPad, some are starting to build versions for other tablets. EBay, for instance, is building Android tablet apps and a new version of its website designed for tablets. Others, like Blue Nile, the online diamond retailer, are taking a different approach, constructing tablet versions of their websites instead of apps on the theory that most traffic still comes through Web searches.

The idea is to offer “shop-ertainment,” said Siva Kumar, chief executive of TheFind, a shopping search engine that last week introduced Catalogue, a tablet app that pulls together interactive catalogues from about 30 retailers including Crate & Barrel and Sephora.

Many retailers say they see a lucrative future in tablet shopping because even though tablets made up only about 4.4 per cent of all computers shipped in 2010, according to Morgan Stanley, they are expected to make up about 20 per cent within two years. And iPad owners, who tend to be affluent given the $499 price tag for the device, already prefer not only browsing but also buying from a retailer’s app rather than the website in some cases.

©2011 The New York
Times News Service