Ever wanted to be able to buy a dress with the same sort of ease you can purchase an app? That’s the aim from social shopping site Lyst, now referred to as a “personalised fashion marketplace”, with the launch of its new integrated checkout feature from today.
The three-year-old company is introducing an express shopping option directly from individual product pages, meaning users are no longer taken to third-party sites to buy the pieces they want. In doing so it’s aiming to capture consumers at the moment of inspiration, rather than expecting them to fill out multiple sets of payment and shipping details around the web.
Launch partners include both retailers and brands, from Alexander Wang, Theory and Helmut Lang, to Satine, Revolve and Lane Crawford. Initially it’s for shipping to the US market only, with plans to expand internationally throughout the rest of the year.
Speaking at the press launch this morning, Chris Morton, co-founder and CEO, said there were already two million people visiting Lyst every month, 50% of which are in the US. “We expect to see a step change increase in the number of sales that we generate for our partners as a result of this,” he explained. Mobile is another big focus of this move to make checking out seamless, based off the fact traffic to Lyst from smartphones and tablet devices has grown from 8% in 2012, to 30% so far this year. “People are happy to buy on mobile today, we just have to make it easy for them,” Morton said.
Importantly, the process is also a very simple one for Lyst’s partners, separating the site out from other companies attempting to introduce the same. “There’s no integration work required for our partners, meaning there’s therefore no fees for them either. We’re really proud of that. It’s hard to make something very easy,” said Morton.
Lyst handles the actual purchase, using proprietary technology to securely store users’ payment and shipping information, reports WWD, but the fulfillment of the purchase is then carried out by the designer or retailer. Morton refers to it as “moving the buy button”. Everything after that from the delivery, to the customer service, even the packaging belongs to the brand. “Think of us as a shopping mall,” he said. “A marketplace.”
A key factor in making this work is that inventory availability is constantly tracked by Lyst. “I’ve been waiting for this day for three and a half years,” Morton started this morning, “but it was too difficult to do from a tech point of view before. The most important thing is that what we have on Lyst matches with what’s on those partner sites. If it doesn’t, that results in a bad experience for our consumers and seriously breaks down those relationships.” He has a significant tech team in place to make sure they’re constantly solving that problem.
Other launch partners include James Perse, Hudson Jeans, Maiyet, Rag & Bone, Cynthia Rowley, Intermix, the Yoox Group, Trina Turk and Seven For All Mankind. More than 7,000 designers are currently represented on Lyst.
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Tags: checkout, commerce, designer, digital, e-commerce, fashion, Lyst, online, payments, retail, social, social commerce, social media, start-up, technology
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