Consumers can shop hundreds of stores and create their own personalized shopping mall by customizing their favorite stores. The application is available for Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Palm’s WebOS.

“With the incredible number of apps out there, most consumers are not going to download and use shopping apps from hundreds of individual retailers, so we want to provide an app that is similar to a mall – it brings together many stores in one place,” said Arish Ali, cofounder and president of Skava, San Francisco.

“With that in mind, we want to provide a rich user experience and personalized shopping for consumers on their smartphones,” he said. “We call the app My Mall since users can personalize this virtual mobile mall by selecting their favorite stores as My Stores.

My Mall is a virtual shopping mall with more than 1,500 stores.

Here is a screen grab of the application:

Virtual shopping
Users can browse and search through shopping catalogs, look for special deals and buy items via their handset.

The application features stores that cover various shopping categories such as accessories, books, music, video, electronics, hardware, beauty, home, jewelry and toys.

Some of the stores include Zappos, Armani Exchange, Target, Home Depot, Zales, The North Face, Calvin Klein, Bebe, Best Buy, Calvin Klein and Saks Fifth Avenue.

Additionally, consumers can browse by category in a store or search for products across all stores.

There is a “buy now” feature that lets consumers buy directly from their smartphone by taking them to the merchant’s Web site.

“Our app business model is based on affiliate revenue share and through ads,” Mr. Ali said. “We have had some affiliate revenues come through, but it is not significant yet.

“Our app has the ability to show our own ads and promotions, which are ads from the stores we are showing in the app,” he said. “The app can also source ads from the major mobile ad networks, but we are currently not using that as a revenue stream and are focusing on doing our own store-related promotions.”

Here is another screen grab of the application:

On-the-go purchases
Consumers also have the option to create their own shopping cart and email it to themselves to review and then buy the items from their PC.

Users can share their favorite products on Facebook with their friends and rate items.

Skava is looking at releasing applications for the BlackBerry and iPad in the future.

“We have not done any marketing yet,” Mr. Ali said. “We wanted to get the app live and see how users are actually using the app and then further improve the app to make it more useful before we start spending on marketing the app.

“We plan to use mobile ad networks and our own mailing lists to market the app,” he said.