Zaker’s New iPad Shopping App is a Dedicated Follower of Fashion

The Chinese startup behind the Flipboard clone Zaker has released a new app for iPad that’s aimed at fashion-loving women. Called Zaker Showcase, it’s a dedicated fashion and shopping app (pictured above) that’s filled with couture items to browse and then buy.

The makers will be hoping that its new Zaker Showcase will emulate the success of its original app, which now has just over 5 million users. The two are similar in that they present an easy format for browsing and image viewing, with options to share articles to social media such as Sina Weibo. But the key difference is that the original app was just for news reading – while this new venture is for window-shopping and purchasing clothes. As such, the new Showcase app supports account syncing with Taobao, China’s biggest e-commerce site, so that clothing items seen in the app can be more easily searched and bought online. It’s not clear if there’s a method for Zaker to generate revenue from e-commerce referrals, as occurs with local Pinterest-like sites such as Mogujie – but it is very likely doing so with this interesting and clever mobile commerce move.

Within the Zaker Showcase iPad app, users can search for fashion by type or style. Also, comments made by other users can be seen right next to the clothes. There’s full checkout and purchasing support too. We won’t be surprised to see some larger Chinese web companies emulate this more social and finger-friendly approach to social/mobile commerce in the near future – especially Alibaba’s Taobao or Tmall sites.

Grab the new Zaker Showcase app for iPad from the iTunes Store.

[Source: 36kr – article in Chinese]