Apps to communicate, pay, hookup, share documents, optimize domestic economy, buy fashion… Apps and more apps.
Apps will continue to invade our smartphones or at least those are the foresights. According to a study from the Yankee Group investigation company, the number of app installations will pass from 134,150 million in 2014 to 341,890 in 2018 worldwide. The question is, who doesn’t have an app installed in their smartphone?
It could be because we are spending more and more time submerged in our mobile devices or ,even, because the digital era has made us more tech demanding. Whatever it is, the truth is that we are constantly demanding new value added to brands, new experiences or even more simple, easier and agile experiences for our day by day life.
But the question we have to make ourselves is not which app have we used recently (that most likely will be Whatsapp) but… does my business really need an app? Or said in another way, what can the app give that my ecommerce cannot?
Many fashion ecommerce, suffering from app mania fever, launched their own apps to the market. Right or wrong? Most caused a great disappointment to users since apps were not provided with any additional functionality than a responsive web, that is to say, a web optimized for mobile.
However, users have fallen into the “trick” of downloading them, either attracted by the “free” factor or for the discount formulas, without ignoring the strong advertising investment that brands do to guarantee the first positions in the App Store and Google Play rankings. But when the pictures of our Camera Roll start being a threat for the capacity of our devices, precisely these types of apps are the ones that suffer the so afraid ‘uninstall’.
This is why it is so important that apps provide with a unique added value. One very recent example in the fashtech market is The Net Set, the fashion app from the luxury Net-a-Porter site. More than just shopping, the app from the fashionistas favorite site allows to discover, share, upload, comment, recommend, find, create… The Net Set is more than the new social network for the fashionistas, is the ‘exclusive’ (since it goes by invitation) shopping social network. Because of its repercussion and good reviews, it seems that it will become one of the leader apps for the fashion ecommerce in the next few months.
Natalie Massenet, founder of the Net-a-Porter group, points that “The evolution of the social networks and the style blogs have shown that women from the whole world are inspired in the style and closets from others”.
So that, if we are inspired in celebrities’ and fashionistas’ looks, why not shopping directly from an image? That’s what the creators of The Net Set should have thought when they decided to give one more step and integrate image recognition technology in their fashion app, similar to the one developed by Wide Eyes Technologies. Technology that the user perceives as an added feature, an invitation to a new, fun, intuitive and effective shopping experience, the visual shopping experience. Or said in other way, shop from an image.
Though for many of you The Net Set is not a novelty instead a restyling of fashion apps like Asap54, Style Eyes or the fashion visual search engine Similify. But you will agree that it gathers all the requirements to be part of the group of apps that must stay installed (maybe until one better arrives) in our devices. So from here we are glad to give Net-a-Porter a welcome to the visual era.
