What’s an e‑commerce man­ag­er to do when a new­ly-launched mobile app turns out to be a bit of a flop? Go back to the draw­ing board and make a bet­ter one.

That’s what fash­ion e‑commerce start­up Mono­gram has done, after the iPad app it launched last year turned out to be a lit­tle under­whelm­ing in the con­sumer inter­est it attract­ed. It was meant to be a shop­pable, mobile mag­a­zine for fash­ion­istas and it looked seri­ous­ly promis­ing, allow­ing users to buy items that tick­led their fan­cy in a jiffy.  But it just didn’t catch on as expected.

A phoenix rises

Mono­gram founder Leo Chen didn’t go into a cor­ner and sulk, how­ev­er.  Like the most sea­soned of e‑commerce man­agers, he took a long hard look at it and real­ized it didn’t suf­fi­cient­ly moti­vate users to share indi­vid­ual prod­ucts.  That’s how Mono­gram 2.0 came into being, ris­ing phoenix-like from the ash­es of its pre­de­ces­sor.  It’s just been launched — and it looks set to solve the prob­lems of the ear­li­er app admirably.

It’s a blog­gers delight: by using a full suite of web-edit­ing tools, blog­gers can cre­ate posts or even full “mag­a­zines” to share their fash­ion favorites with oth­ers. The pub­lish­ing part of the tool is won­der­ful­ly sim­ple to use, but here’s the thing that’ll rouse the admi­ra­tion of the inno­v­a­tive e‑commerce man­ag­er to envy-point: the fab­u­lous inte­grat­ed search func­tion­al­i­ty. Blog­gers don’t have to set out on a hunt through the labyrinth of the net to find the items they want to add and they don’t have to go through the labo­ri­ous process of adding affil­i­ate links.  Monogram’s inte­grat­ed search func­tion does all that.

Viewa­bil­i­ty

And to cap it all, this new ver­sion of Mono­gram makes shar­ing and view­ing addic­tive­ly sim­ple: it’s built as a respon­sive­ly designed web app, which means that it can be viewed on a tablet, a smart­phone or a desk­top PC.  But it doesn’t stop there.  New fea­tures for blog­gers like advanced report­ing are in the pipeline and an affil­i­ate mod­el is under devel­op­ment so that Mono­gram can get paid for any item sold through its mag­a­zines.  Accord­ing to Chen, when this is up and run­ning, the bulk of the pay­ments will go to the blog­gers while the firm will take a small cut.

This app looks des­tined for great things.