Aiming to let shoppers access its e-commerce sites the way they choose, Drugstore.com Inc. launched today it its first iPhone app-designed to put a fresh new face on shopping at Beauty.com, chief marketing officer David Lonczak says.
The Beauty.com iPhone app, which consumers can download from Apple Inc.’s app store at Apple.com/iphone/apps-for-iphone, is designed to give iPhone users a more robust shopping experience than they can currently get by directly accessing the beauty products site through an iPhone’s Safari browser, Lonczak says.
The app, developed with mobile technology provider Digby, is designed to let shoppers easily access and use several popular features on Beauty.com, including its Your List personal shopping feature, which lets customers quickly see lists of past purchases; the ability to browse among categories of more than 200 brands; comprehensive product information such as customer-generated reviews; the ability to e-mail product recommendations to friends; and stored shipping address and payment card account information.
The Beauty.com iPhone app is Drugstore.com’s second foray into m-commerce, but far from its last, Lonczak says. Two years ago, the retailer optimized Beauty.com and Drugstore.com for appearing on Blackberry mobile phones-at the time a dominant mobile device. Since then, however, it has noticed that more consumers access its sites through iPhones, which debuted two years ago with larger screens along with touch-screen technology more suitable for browsing web sites, he adds.
Today, with Blackberry as well as other phones operating on the Android and Symbian operating systems better designed for mobile commerce, and with 30% to 50% of cell phone users using m-commerce-capable smartphones, Drugstore plans to continue developing its m-commerce strategy, Lonczak says.
“We know people are coming to our sites today directly from mobile devices, and we know we can do more to facilitate that,” says Alison Jeske, the retailer`s senior director of marketing services.
Although Jeske and Lonczak decline to offer specifics, they say Drugstore plans to continue working with Digby, and possibly other technologies, to develop additional apps that consumers can download to their mobile phones, such as a hair-care product recommender for Beauty.com, as well as work toward optimizing its e-commerce sites for direct browsing from mobile devices. “We don’t want to be on the bleeding edge,” Lonczak says. “But we need to be where consumers are with m-commerce.”
Drugstore is No. 48 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.
Lonczak will be speaking at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition, June 8-11 in Chicago, in a session entitled Taking the scary part out of going global.
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