Dipping its toes in e-commerce, the personalized magazine app Flipboard today launched a way for anyone to create catalogs on the service.
The new feature is an extension of a move in March to allow users to create their own online magazines. To date, some 4.5 million magazines have been created, CEO Mike McCue said in an interview. Flipboard's user base has been booming this year, growing from 50 million registered users in March to 90 million today (though it's not clear how many of those are active users).
The new catalog feature, which adds shopping to the app's range of content categories, is likely to be particularly popular with retailers. Some are launching several catalogs. Banana Republic, for instance, has created eight shops that correspond to in-store holiday-themed shops, such as Apres Ski Shop and Candy Shop. Banana Republic Chief Marketing Officer Catherine Sadler said in a statement to Forbes that Flipboard allows the company to "keep Banana Republic top of mind, create buzz and drive engagement with our brand"--in other words, pretty much traditional brand marketing. (Update:
Other retailers participating are Etsy, Levi Strauss, eBay, Fab.com, Birchbox, and ModCloth. Fab is creating five magazines on gifts, decor, entertaining and Fab-exclusive items, all of which it says it plans to keep updating. The company said the content on Flipboard is a condensed "snapshot" of its full product offerings on its site and app.
In addition, celebrity "curators" such as actor Alyssa Milano, singer Sara Evans, chef Daniel Boulud, and fashion designer Cynthia Rowley have created magazines of their favorite products. Flipboard editors also have created 12 other product magazines on women's wear, electronics, toys, and more. One or two more retailers may be added by the holiday shopping season, with up to 20 more early next year.
Potentially with this feature, Flipboard is atomizing e-commerce in much the same way it's atomizing content. Except that companies that want to sell you something are likely to be a lot more appreciative of the exposure they get from Flipboard magazines/catalogs (magalogs? Catazines?) than publishers. At least some of the latter recently opted out of Flipboard, saying they want revenues more than free exposure.
Although the catalog angle clearly emphasizes products, McCue says people can mix and match products, articles, reviews, and whatever else they choose. "Effectively everyone can create their own mini-catalog," McCue says. They also can create wish lists for themselves and family and friends.
That could lead to a blurring of the lines between magazines and catalogs. It's not yet clear whether that will be beneficial to either form, though cataloguers have for years tried blending content into their paper catalogs. In any case, it should be clear enough which content is articles and reviews and which is products. Indeed, the flip.it button can detect when a product is being "flipped" and let curators add a price tag. While explaining the catalog feature, moreover, McCue told his product chief, Eugene Wei, that Flipboard needed to make the source of the products clearer.
The catalog feature isn't exactly a surprise, or even entirely new. With the March addition of custom magazine creation, Flipboard added Etsy, so people could buy products from the e-commerce site from within Flipboard. Levi has a similar arrangement. The new catalogs now allow anyone, including brands, to create their own catalogs--as many as they want. Larger brands that want a more polished offering like Levi's work directly with Flipboard to create a more polished magazine, a process that takes two to three weeks.
Flipboard, which raised $50 million in a Series C funding round in September, does not make money off the sales of products from the catalogs, even though that would seem to be a potentially attractive business model. When people click on a buy button on product in a Flipboard catalog, they land on the product page on the retailer's website, inside the Safari browser on the iPhone or iPad, while staying within Flipboard. So how does Flipboard make money? Same way as always: It sells the retailers its trademark full-page ads, which McCue says cost 10 times as much as traditional Web banner ads.
In a way, Flipboard is following well behind Pinterest, whose boards created from "pinning" products are essentially user-generated social catalogs. But given Flipboard's rampant user growth, the 4-year-0ld Palo Alto company has at least a decent chance to capture more advertising that looks and acts like magazine ads but offers a much more direct way for customers to buy right away.
