Call it the instant-ification of everything, but mobile apps have proved a remarkably effective tool at on-demand ordering. By pre-storing all of the information needed to complete a transaction (things like address and credit card info), apps have minimized once-complex tasks to a single finger tap or swipe. Tap a button, get a car ride. Swipe a screen, get your groceries.
Still, a surprising number of e-commerce apps seem stuck in the pre-Uber days. There are those that send users to partner Web sites to complete transactions (forcing users to type credit card information into impossibly tiny touchscreen fields). There are those who claim to offer instant ordering of algorithm-picked goods based upon your taste or personality, only to present users with a handful of products from the few brands their biz dev team happened to get on board. And then there are those who still require users to sift through a shopping cart, which has always felt like the digital equivalent of a retail worker berating you with "Are you sure you want to buy that product?" (Honestly, after seeing the total price one more time? Probably not.)
The bottom line: While recent apps have thrived at delivering on-demand services to users, there are few that have gotten the retail shopping experience just right; and been able to actually sell us stuff with an Uber-like level of simplicity.
About time, right? Thankfully, we're starting to see new shopping apps that finally give customers this friction-free (or at least friction-lite) experience. Exhibit A: Spring, a new iOS shopping app that launches today. The premise: A direct-sales platform cleverly (and beautifully) disguised as an Instagram-like feed that happens to be peppered with beautiful photos and "Buy" buttons. The app features everything from apparel, to gadgets, to mattresses; though users can choose which brands they want to follow. Spring also integrates with a brand's existing e-commerce platform, allowing them to push whatever they want to users, while presenting their products however they want (so no fear of going off-brand with pictures or messaging). I'm told it's about as easy for brands to post for-sale products to Spring as it is for you or I to post a photo to Instagram.
As a user, it's hard to imagine how the experience could be simpler. Because brands are encouraged to post colorful "lifestyle" photos of their products, the overall look of the product comes off as cheerful, fun, and highly browsable. And because Spring is a direct-sales platform (I'm told there are hundreds of brands on board at launch), it's not hard to imagine a future in which companies utilize the control this affords them to regularly offer special deals or limited-run merchandise. (Buyer beware: Actually buying a product is about as easy as dishing out an Instagram "Like", meaning this could soon be a favorite (or feared) app of late-night impulse shoppers.)
So is there any future for the shopping cart? Sure. As long as it gets smarter or serves a purpose to users beyond giving them a few more screens to click through. Take Keep, a sort of universal wish list for the Web, where users can bookmark (or "Keep") items they're interested in via the app or Web interface. A clever new feature allows users to check out any item from any store using Keep, without having to go through the tiresome types and taps normally required to shop at multiple individual stores. In other words: This is a Web-wide universal shopping cart. The most astonishing part: Because Keep is designed to work with e-commerce sites that have not partnered with the platform, a Keep representative told me that a human actually manually completes the transaction for the user. A human! So while Keep may look like a standard wish list app, it's actually an Uber for on-demand online shoppers.
Seth Porges is a writer and co-creator of Cloth for iOS. For more fun, follow Seth on Twitter at @sethporges, or subscribe to him on Facebook or Google+.
