New York-based social pho­to-shar­ing plat­form Trend­abl, which has become the Insta­gram of fash­ion pho­tos, is tak­ing a bold step into e‑commerce just 18 months after its launch. And most sea­soned ecom­merce ana­lysts would prob­a­bly agree that it rep­re­sents a nat­ur­al next step.

From shar­ing to shopping

Trendabl’s empha­sis to date has been on expand­ing its com­mu­ni­ty and sign­ing brands along the way, amongst them big names like Diane von Fursten­berg, Bar­neys and Michael Kors. The ser­vice lets fash­ion pub­lish­ers, brands and fash­ion­ista-users upload images and tag the pic­tured items.

The ecom­merce ini­tia­tive involves around 15 small­er retail­ers (Ani­ta Ko, Young and Reck­less, Singer22 and Reece Hud­son includ­ed), although all U.S.-based retail­ers and brands can apply. But a poten­tial­ly con­fus­ing issue appears at this point, as the can­ny ecom­merce ana­lyst would doubt­less spot: since not all the fash­ion items uploaded are pur­chasable, how does a Trend­abl new­bie work out what’s shop­pable and what’s not?

The solu­tion is twofold. Shop­pable items will appear in a user’s feed accom­pa­nied by a “Buy” but­ton; and for those who don’t want to sift through man­u­al­ly to find out what they can and can’t buy, the app now fea­tures a curat­ed shop feed which brings all the shop­pable items together.

Fus­ing social and com­merce seamlessly

To take the glitch­es out of shop­ping across numer­ous dif­fer­ent mer­chants (some of which, for exam­ple, won’t be opti­mized for mobile, while oth­ers may have stopped sell­ing the want­ed prod­uct) Trend­abl has tak­en own­er­ship of the trans­ac­tion process. All shop­pers need do is add their cred­it card details to the Trend­abl file, drop items that have tak­en their fan­cy into their vir­tu­al bas­kets and click “Buy”.

As soon as an order is placed, Trend­abl alerts the mer­chant with an email which includes the ship­ping label and invoice. To make sure that its stock­ing infor­ma­tion is accu­rate­ly cur­rent, Trend­abl inte­grates with all its retail­ers’ back­ends. Although retail­ers ship prod­ucts in their own box­es at present, Trend­abl has plans in the pipeline to use its own brand­ed ship­ping pack­ag­ing for all purchases.

As founder and CEO Joe Alegem puts it:

“Our goal is that we real­ly want to merge social and com­merce. We want every brand and retail­er to sell on Trend­abl, because it’s a true plat­form, it’s some­thing that can work all around the world.”