Urban Outfitters and Nicole Miller are among brands that are part of social shopping network Wanelo’s move to streamline the customer journey by launching a “buy” button that enables purchases from within the network’s mobile application.

By using the “Buy on Wanelo” feature, consumers on the app can buy any of 500,000 items directly from brands’ product pages without having to be redirected to the retailers’ ecommerce sites to complete purchases or to enter credit card information. The launch aims to give shoppers the seamless connection between mobile and in-store service offered in travel and other fields as the biggest shopping time of the year heats up.

“Our users come to do nothing but shop, but we know they’ve been wanting an easier way to buy, especially on mobile where four out of five millennial shoppers are already buying directly from mobile devices,” said Deena Varshavskaya, founder and CEO of Wanelo.

“Our users give us feedback that shopping on the phone is painful and they want a better, faster way to complete the purchase.”

Simplifying check-out
On Wanelo’s app, shoppers simply tap the “buy” button shown under the product, choose their size and color options, and tap “place order” to complete the purchase, which Wanelo will then process.

Wanelo, which generates 90 percent of its traffic through mobile platforms, found in tests of the “buy” button this summer that in-app conversions were three times higher than standard Wanelo mobile conversions.

Wanelo has 200 brands using its “buy” button.

“It’s clear that this is the type of experience consumers want when you look at how Wanelo is performing for brands,” Ms. Varshavskaya said.

“For example, Urban Outfitters has nearly 3 million followers on Wanelo, and they report we convert four to six times higher than any other social network. And on average, an active user on Wanelo taps the ‘buy’ button three times per day.

“Only active users who are there to buy can generate this level of engagement and results for brands,” she said.

About 200 brands ranging from large retailers to unique independent stores so far are using the Wanelo “buy” button, including Urban Outfitters, Nasty Gal, Nicole Miller, Torn by Ronny Kobo, House of Harlow 1960, Leif Shop, Rag & Bone, River Island, ModCloth, Azalea, Seldom Seen and Zara Terez.

To create a more seamless connection with shoppers on mobile, Wanelo this summer began sending push notifications to users who saved certain items to let them know that those items had gone on sale. Wanelo also began accepting direct product feeds from retailers, which it prioritized on its site with the knowledge that the data was accurate. Retailers could input each product individually to send to Wanelo, or they could use the same feed that they sent to Google Shopping, for example.

In July, social shopping gained the wider availability that could drive the uptake for which marketers were hoping with Facebook’s revelation that it was testing a “buy” button as well as Twitter’s acquisition of CardSpring to build in-tweet card-linked offers and commerce.

Streamlining commerce
With mobile a significant and still growing way that social networks are accessed by consumers, it is imperative that social commerce experiences be streamlined for easy use on small screens.

A crowded playing field.

Wanelo had to give shoppers the ability to purchase directly within the mobile application, given that it is competing with strong mobile oriented shopping apps such as Gilt, Rue La La and OneKingsLane.

“Other mobile apps have also shown significant mobile purchase growth such as Groupon, eBay and a slew of others with many of these vendors seeing 50 to 60 percent of their transactions coming from mobile,” said Sheryl Kingstone, Toronto-based research director at Yankee Group.

“If [Wanelo] didn’t build this into their application, they would become irrelevant in the eyes of their customers.”

Final Take
Michael Barris is staff reporter on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York.