Westfield adds product search to its smartphone app
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A smartphone app is hoping to take the inefficiency out of mall shopping.
Shopping center giant Westfield has launched a new feature on its mall app that allows shoppers to search more than 100,000 products from 215 retailers at Westfield’s 55 centers nationwide.
The search function, powered by Google Commerce Search, works like this:
-- Download the free app to your iPhone, Droid or Blackberry.
-- Search for a specific product, such as ‘gold sandals.’
-- The app will churn out applicable results, showing you which stores carry gold sandals as well as images and prices. Shoppers can then organize the results by relevance, retailer or price and call the store to check availability.
For years, there was ‘the online shopping experience and the mall shopping experience, and the two haven’t mixed,’ said David Towers, vice president of digital business for Westfield U.S. The app, which the mall operator says is the first to use such a comprehensive search function, ‘brings the best components of online shopping to the mall.’
Results for the product are not in real time, so they won’t reflect out-of-stock merchandise, although Westfield is hoping to add that function in the future, Towers said.
Nitin Mangtani, group product manager at Google Commerce, said the search function caters to the way shoppers today research and buy items. Although 90% of retail sales still happen in a physical bricks-and-mortar store, half the research that shoppers do before purchasing a product occurs online, he said.
-- Andrea Chang
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