Elle has launched a shoppable trend guide on Facebook in the latest of several ecommerce initiatives within the magazine industry.
The guide, embedded as a tab on Elle's Facebook page, invites shoppers to navigate across six editorially chosen spring trends, including floral, nautical and ladylike.
Users can click "love," "want, "own" or "buy!" on each product page. By default, all interactions with the app are shared automatically on their Facebook Timeline -- so even if users don't make a purchase, they can inadvertently draw curious friends in to interact with the app. Users can also click to buy each product on the retailer's website.
The app has some strong attributes, while other features could have been better executed. Elle and its ecommerce partner 8th Bridge were smart to embed the "love," "want" and "own" buttons on each page and tie that to Facebook's Open Graph.
This makes it easy for users to interact, and allows Elle to turn those interactions into marketing promotions, as every action is shared with a user's friends.
Kevin O’Malley, chief revenue officer and publisher at Elle, said that the app is less about pushing sales and more about leveraging recommendations among friends.
"We have no idea how much business this will generate, how transactional will this be, whether Facebook really is the right platform or interface for transactions," O'Malley told Mashable. "We do know Facebook is the right platform for advocacy and for getting people to talk about products based on their likes. We've embedded gestures that get immediately posted to users' walls and into their friends' newsfeeds so that even if the consumer has not clicked to buy, they're still giving some sort of endorsement, some sort of a shared gesture."
"That's where the advertisers and ourselves see a lot of value in this, in terms of allowing Facebook to do what it does so well: get personal endorsements from other friends," he added.
While that part of the app is well-designed, product selection itself could have been better executed. Because Elle only features products from advertisers, the selection is limited and disjointed. A collarless white blouse doesn't belong in the "sporting goods" section, nor is body lotion necessarily an optimal choice for achieving a ladylike look.
The app would be far more compelling if editors were given complete control over product selection, perhaps with advertiser product mixed in and clearly disclosed as such.
Lastly, we think the experience would have been far better if users could have done all of their shopping within the app, instead of having to go to a dozen-odd third-party websites to complete their purchases. There's also no way to systematically access items they claim to "love," "want" or "own."