With nearly every major magazine converting the entrancing glossiness of their pages into the form of an iPad app, it comes as no surprise that the online retailer Zappos is following suit. Zappos patrons can now access the retailer’s products through iPad in the semblance of an editorial magazine which dishes out the latest trends in fashion, tips on embellishing the canvases of our bodies via make-up or garments, and, to emphasize the transition from plain retailer to mobile app magazine, a regular flow of interviews with designers and industry experts. This is all, by the way, in addition to their mobile app for iOS.

So What’s the Logic?

According to the Internet marketing research company comScore, 38-percent of smartphone users used their phones as a means to make a purchase at least once. This is a significant trend that thriving online companies such as Zappos have obviously picked up on. In addition to reaching out to a potentially new and promising demographic of mobile purchasers, companies benefit from being able to now send catalogs to patrons electronically, thus highlighting both the convenient and environmentally positive impact of mobile commerce. And with such an astounding amount of the populace clinging to their mobile devices as a kind of all-in-one instrument for connection, it only makes sense that retail would inevitably infiltrate this hand-held realm.

Viral Marketing

In order to produce brand awareness and product sales, companies have most notably penetrated the fertile land of  advertising and marketing in connection to the mobile world. Viral marketing subsists on a high pass-along rate from person-to-person; when a large percentage of mobile recipients forward something to a large number of friends and family, the overall growth leads almost magically to a greater volume of traffic which lends itself eventually to purchases.
The advertising and marketing side of mobile media has proven to create remarkable effects in that the technology of mobile devices has become normal, ubiquitous, and so pervasive that it has in a sense become socially integrated to the point of invisibility. In places like Japan it is incredibly common to use one’s mobile device to accomplish a nearly all-encompassing range of activities such as making payments, searching, music, messaging, reading books, TV, and of course shopping amongst other daily staples of socializing.

In Perspective

At least 90-percent of mobile users access the web daily and companies like AXE have constructed mobile marketing campaigns that include a mobile Web site, ringtones, text alerts, and an extensive TV ad campaign with SMS calls-to-action that inevitably draw more and more consumers to their products; companies are unarguably fusing interactive forms of communication with the mobile populace in ways that tap into the space existing between user and phone which is at once personal and yet seamlessly connected to the world through nearly seamless marketing. Bar code scanning for example enables you to immediately educate yourself on a particular product, leads you to the possibility of purchasing it, and does all this with a swiftness that eliminates physically waiting in lines.

As instant gratification goes when retail meets the app world, one now has the ability to click, purchase, and satiate vanity’s desire for those shoes or that dress. ZN offers a glimpse of the mobile app on their ZN for iPad blog. Perhaps the best perk of shopping using this app as opposed to going to Zappos.com is the fact that you benefit from free next business day shipping without the need to contemplate a minimum purchase.