How Retailers Are Making Use Of Native iPhone Applications

Fri Sep 04, 2009 0 Comments

The market has spoken. Getting a branded iPhone application live is becoming table stakes. The biggest retailers are already live, with many more in the pipe coming shortly as I am expecting a release rush before the holiday 2009 season begins. Many of these apps have already had numerous production releases which have continued to increase the usefulness of many of them. That is a great sign that these retailers are seeing real value in these apps, as they would not continue to refine them otherwise.

Below, we’ll explore in more detail the Best Buy, Sears (Sears2Go) and JCPenney (JCP) iPhone apps as they currently represent the “best of” the retail category.

As of this moment in time, this is the complete list of retail iPhone apps that are live.

The true product and deals centric retail iPhone app list today looks like:

Sears
Best Buy
JCPenney
Target
Amazon
Mastercard Priceless Picks (sort of, its a stretch as this spans)

There are a few other non-product and deal centric apps within retail which are:

Macy*s
Barnes & Noble
Target Finder
Wal-Mart

So if one was to try and find what’s in common with these three top retail iPhone apps, it would be:

All have easy to use store locators
All have some concepts of deals
All have a variation of a shopping list (or a way of collecting items of interest)

Within these three featured apps, there are many other features, but these three (3) are the core basis of what I would suggest is the minimal marketable feature set for a retailer with a large store footprint.

Here is the Best Buy iPhone app broken down:

Main screen. Best looking overall for sure.

If a user wants to see "deals" they first need to narrow down what category of interest they want to view

Once a deal category is selected, a result set of appropriate deals are returned

Then a user can drill into a specific item of interest

All items can be added to this shopping list function called "Favorites" which is nothing more than a collection point for items of interest

The store locator is really simple and only brings up nearby locations to the user

And some basic store details are available with nice click to call and click to map buttons

Next up is the brand new JCPenney iPhone application:

The app immediately starts up and needs a user to interact with it by choosing a category of interest

This is the weirdest screen. Not a fan. This is a view that should be skipped and the user instead take to a list of relevant results

This is one of the nine deals Women's apparel deals. I missed the fact the first time that one can scroll left and right through all nine item results. Cool UI idea, just needs a stronger visual clue to help indicate that this interaction is possible

All items can also be added to this version of a shopping list, again called "Favorites"

The store locator is also very simple, with all of the details being forced up to this level. There is no store details page, but the push to call and push to map buttons are more prominent

Finally, here is the Sears iPhone app, branded Sears2Go exposed: