ShopStyle has extended its shopping experience to Apple’s iPad with a search-and-browse experience that showcases designer products in tablet form.

Consumers can search by brand or category for men, women and children. The company also has an iPhone and iPod touch application available for free download.

“Our Web site is very much optimized for the desktop or laptop and while it has been updated to work OK on the iPad, we wanted to take advantage of the iPad’s form factor and user experience by creating a unique iPad app,” said Andy Moss, cofounder, vice president and general manager of ShopStyle, San Francisco. 

“It’s actually a universal app, so our existing ShopStyle Mobile iPhone users will simply get the optimized experience if they also install the app on their iPads,” he said.

“Shopping for fashion is a highly visual experience and we are very pleased with the search-and-browse experience that we have created that really showcases the beautiful items available.”

ShopStyle is a fashion search and social shopping site that brings together designer retailers and brands in the fashion, home decor and kids/baby categories.

Shop it to me
The large images of products such as dresses, shoes and bags make for an excellent browsing experience.  Consumers can even see the texture of the items.

Users can scroll through multiple products at once or see each one close-up in gallery view, as well as search by keyword within a category or across all products and filter the search by brand, store, size, color, price or sale.

“I’d say that the browsing experience just seems much more personal with the iPad compared with the equivalent experience on my laptop,” Mr. Moss said.

“The other benefit of the iPad over the iPhone is that the click through experience to the retailer’s product and checkout pages becomes much more usable than the current iPhone pages for most retailers given the size limitations,” he said.

“That is improving on the iPhone side too as retailers optimize their carts, but it’s a non-issue on the iPad out of the box.”

Mobile fashion
In addition to browsing and searching, consumers can shop via the application and buy products directly from the retailer.

Consumers can click the “buy” button on any product and go straight to the store’s purchase page.

Users can also save their favorite products within the application and email, publish or tweet their favorites to friends and family.

ShopStyle’s iPhone and iPad applications are localizable to five major markets: United States, Britain, Germany, France and Japan.

“It works the same way as our Web site – we get paid by the retailers that we refer traffic to, either as a commission on the sales generated or tied to a cost per click,” Mr. Moss said.

“We want to extend the ShopStyle experience to the mobile space wherever possible as we anticipate mobile taking an ever increasing share of user traffic – as it already has in markets like Japan,” he said.

Final Take