Online retailer Fab.com boosts its mobile commerce strategy with daily lookbooks to make it fun and easy for shoppers to discover the latest trends from their mobile devices.

The daily full-page lookbooks are available through the Catalog Spree shopping app for iPad and iPhone, which enables users to browse catalogs from 350 merchants in one app. By publishing new content on a regular basis, Fab is able to get shoppers engaged and coming back for more shopping ideas.

“Consumers increasingly want to shop on their mobile devices,” said Joaquin Ruiz, CEO of Catalog Spree, Los Altos, CA. “Yet retailers have struggled to deliver highly-engaging content to mobile devices, especially tablets.

“By offering a fun and easy way to shop, we’ve found Catalog Spree users to be very engaged,” he said. “The average Catalog Spree iPad user session is 25 minutes and the average iPhone session is 11 minutes.

“Over a month’s time, a typical user spends more than one and a half hours in the app viewing more than 500 lookbook and catalog pages. Our users are consistently consuming a lot of content from dozens of brands.”

Product discovery
Most Catalog Spree users will discover Fab lookbooks in their My Spree view. Catalog Spree learns what product categories and retailers consumers are interested so it can automatically create a line-up of relevant catalogs and lookbooks.

For users who have expressed an interest in Fab, anytime a new lookbook from the merchant becomes available, it will appear at the front of the My Spree line-up.

The lookbooks will also be available under New Catalogs, by departments and under the Fab brand in an alphabetical listing.

Users tap on a lookbook to open it and can immediately begin flipping through the pages to browse as they would with a traditional catalog. Users can also tap on a product to view more information, share on Pinterest, Facebook or email, and shop by hitting the Buy button.

Users are then taken to the product page on the retailer’s web site for payment.

Each Fab shopping category — furniture, home, art, vintage, jewelry, women, men, pets, food, and fun — will have its own lookbook on Catalog Spree.

Visual experiences
Other merchants who have pushed out lookbooks to Catalog Spree users in the past month include Forever 21, Stella & Dot, Target and TOMS Shoes. All together, these merchants have delivered over 50 lookbooks since late June.

Catalog Spree reports that the lookbooks are seeing 50 percent more product click-throughs than traditional digital catalogs. Readership and user engagement levels are also higher.

These merchants are taking advantage of Catalog Spree’s new all-digital publication platform Spree Studio, which pushes out content using a fully automated process. As a result, merchants are able to create exclusive custom content for Catalog Spree on a regular basis.

“Digital lookbooks offer consumers a fun and easy way to browse, shop and discover new products and trends,” Mr. Ruiz said. “Traditional web shopping is generally more functional and transaction focused than it is about the experience.

“It doesn’t always offer the same enjoyment and satisfaction that consumers get when discovering new fashion, trends or inspiration through a very visual and lifestyle medium – such as a lookbook or a catalog,” he said.

“It’s important for today’s retailers to deliver that visual experience to consumers particularly on a tablet platform.”

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York