QVC, the world’s fifth largest mobile merchant is ready to promote on the Apple Watch as soon as it is available on April 24th. QVC’s iPhone and iPad apps have seen 3 million downloads and have received outstanding reviews in the Apple App Store. So a customer can see QVC deals of the day and what is airing in realtime on the network right from their Apple Watch. They will still get all the product details, ratings and other select content.
Shoppers will be able to view the goods and whatever they fancy can be directed to their iPhones for deeper investigation and purchase. When someone turns on the phone, the QVC app will automatically open and go to the product page of the items they had selected through the watch. Overall the whole point is to get the customer to see the product even when they’re not home. Apple refers to it as the “glance experience”.
Alex Miller says “ the Apple Watch confirms and furthers a trend toward the fragmentation of Internet use and online shopping that forces retailers to be more nimble and attentive than ever before to respond to developments”. “QVC, for example, used to exclusively be a TV experience. Then we expanded to the Internet, and then to mobile. Our iPad app now is focused on the ‘second screen experience’ for discovery”. He even goes on to talk about how all home appliances and cars in near future will have digital displays and begin promoting web-connected content.
QVC says the overall investment in connecting the existing iPhone App with the Apple Watch functionality using the Apple Watch Kit isn’t bad, even though they didn’t want to reveal the expense in making this happen. As a start QVC is going to be very delicate about what and how often the customer will receive the messages to their personal watch. The last thing they want is to be annoying. As for right now, no Android connectivity. Too many variables in hardware and software and they know with certainty Apple will be the first to market with one watch and one OS.
So if you fancy yourself a media “type” and are looking to work with the Apple or QVC consider approaching them from the watch side of things. It is obviously going to be a distribution tool like no other until we start getting ads directly transmitted into our visual cortex. Maybe even consider learning how to create Apps while you’re sitting at home sending out resumes to all these companies, it can only help.