New App Lets iPhone Users Photo Shop Amazon

Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) has developed a free application for the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone. Amazon Mobile, launched earlier this week, allows consumers to search for items on Amazon.com, update their shopping carts and wish lists, and make purchases from their iPhones.

Consumers aren't limited to browsing Amazon.com's inventory either -- items from retail partners Macy's and Target are also available for purchase.

Amazon Mobile makes use of the iPhone's built-in high-resolution camera too. Consumers can snap digital photos of items they see while out shopping and store them as reminders for later. In addition, the app will search Amazon.com's inventory for the item -- a feature called "Amazon Remembers."

Wanted: Barcode Reader

Amazon Mobile is a good start, but there's room for improvement, according to Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research.

"It's an interesting use of the technology, but it doesn't seem like the best user experience to me," he told the E-Commerce Times. "If you can take a picture of something, you can probably describe it in text, which you could put into rough search terms."

The Amazon Remembers feature is a bit slow, according to some early reviews.

What the iPhone and Amazon.com really need is a reliable barcode scanning application, Golvin said.

"I'm sure Amazon is thinking of ways to intercept their customers when they're out shopping in bricks and mortar stores," he continued. "The glaring omission so far is the need for some kind of bar code scanner where consumers can scan what they're thinking of buying so that Amazon can offer alternatives to what's on the stores' shelves."

Most phones don't have high enough resolution to snap a photo of a barcode and then transmit it to a retailer, but that probably wouldn't be an issue with the iPhone, said Golvin.

Technology Challenges

While it's clear that consumers today want to browse and shop using their mobile phones, handheld devices have limitations.

"The challenge around these mobile devices has to do with the browsing and discovery process," Golvin said. "They're perfectly sufficient for transactional functions, but the screens are often too small to show your products and reviews, and all the wealth of information people rely on for their decision making process."

Although Amazon is betting it will reach more consumers and see a rise in revenue from the new iPhone app, Apple's potential benefit is less tangible.

"There's a whole general kind of uplift for Apple even on the free apps," Golvin said. "The more apps available, the more stickiness there is to the iPhone. For a lot of people, seeing that one thing they can do on that iPhone that they can't do on another device might make a difference when they make the decision to switch to a new phone."