Meredith Cunningham is the production/online editor for Retail Online Integration, its e-newsletter, The ROI Report, and website, RetailOnlineIntegration.com. Meredith is also the production/online editor for the Target Marketing Group's web-only brand, eM+C.
Before coming to North American Publishing Company, Meredith served as sports editor for The Evening Bulletin in Philadelphia, and was a designer for the Bucks County Courier-Times. She earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Utica College of Syracuse University in 2007.
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In the July/August issue of Retail Online Integration, I discussed the growing trend of catalog apps for tablets, primarily the iPad. I'd never heard of such thing until I went to the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in San Diego this past June. It was there that I discovered Coffee Table and Catalog Spree. In the month-and-a-half since the show, several other catalog apps for the iPad have popped up.
In July, Prestimedia released CustomPad, its new virtual catalog app. Like the other apps before it, CustomPad allows both online and offline shopping and the ability to purchase directly from the app itself rather than switching back and forth from the app to an e-commerce site. Other features include a product locator, videos and slideshows, and news and web content modules.
There's also TheFind’s catalog for the iPad, which includes retailers such as Crate & Barrel and Sephora. This app differs in that participating retailers have the ability to send personalized catalogs to their customers’ tablets based on their interests and purchase history. It's also interesting to note that Crate & Barrel's catalog is featured on Coffee Table's app as well.
A new study from Forrester Research stresses the importance of retailers integrating their catalogs into this new technology. For starters, the tablet shopping marketplace is poised to take a huge chunk of mobile commerce sales. Only 9 percent of web shoppers own a tablet, but 20 percent of all m-commerce sales come from tablets. What's more, 60 percent of tablet owners have used the device to shop and 40 percent use their tablet instead of personal computers when both are available, Forrester found.
The tablet boom is due to three unique features that smartphones and traditional paper catalogs can't offer. They include the following:
Whether a small business or a big one, retailers should follow Crate & Barrel's lead and seriously consider making their catalog available to one if not all of these aggregators. I understand budget issues could prevent a company from entering the space, but as seen with Coffee Table, it's relatively cheap to get involved — certainly cheaper than a cataloger's average printing and postage costs.
By offering your customers and prospects a virtual catalog as part of your marketing mix, you extend both your brand reach and customer relationships while increasing sales with a favorable return on investment. Throw in the fact that tablets are poised to rock the mobile world in the coming years, taking advantage of this technology sooner rather than later is advised.
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