According to Women's Wear Daily, this month, luxury 'e-tailer', Net-a-porter, launched a social e-commerce strategy that specifically targets the mobile channel. The app, aptly named The Netbook, was inspired by a feature on Net-a-porter's website called 'Live' which live-streams what customers are buying, letting everyone know what's 'hot' in real-time.
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| Net-a-porter's Live feature. |
The Netbook app takes the streaming concept and socializes + commercializes it in mobile form. Users have two Instagram-style feeds from which they can follow: 1) a global feed which streams what everyone is buying on Net-a-porter, world-wide and 2) an 'admirer' feed which streams only items purchased by those who the user selects to follow. Unlike Live, The Netbook breaks the wall-of-anonymity by displaying who bought what. Users have profiles (picture and mini-bio included!) and other Netbookers can see who each user is following/being followed by. Yesterday, Net-a-porter's President, Alison Loehnis, bought this Valentino sweater at 6:37pm! And it got 112 likes. She has 46 'admirers' and is admiring 30 fashionable people. These stats are pretty powerful and give a now-measurable weighting to the intangible cool-factor of the purchase. Not only was the sweater bought yesterday, but also the person who bought it is 'cool/popular and in-the-fashion-world' and a lot of other people, 112 at the time, added the sweater to their wishlist; it must be really worth $1,690, possibly more.
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| Loehnis snaps up this Valentino sweater. |
Net-a-porter rolled out the app to a select few influencers (bloggers, designers, stylists, etc.) during London Fashion Week in what I imagine is an effort to build a foundation of fashion-savy users that the rest of company's customers will want to follow once they have access to the app. It will be interesting to see if this concept takes hold as a viable retail channel and social network.
Sources: Econsultancy, Women's Wear Daily.
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