Dive Brief:

• Fashion-focused content company PopSugar has built an effective search engine and marketing business in ShopStyle, which it bought in 2007. And its purchase of mobile shopping platform Cosmic Cart is helping PopSugar pursue its ambitions for ShopStyle.

• As of April, shoppers will be able to store their credit card information through ShopStyle, which drove $1 billion in revenue to retail partners last year even without that feature, according to PopSugar’s founder and CEO, the Wall Street Journal reports.

• ShopStyle users encounter some 18 million products from more than 1,400 retailers worldwide, reports the Journal. Overall, the site has had more than 40 million unique users, according to comScore and had $150 million in revenue last year, the Journal reports.

Dive Insight:

Mobile e-commerce is growing, but activity has been largely regulated to researching and comparing goods, rather than purchase. That will change if smartphone users find that shopping on mobile is easier and secure, or secure enough.

Mobile wallets like Google Wallet or Apple Pay present retailers with marketing opportunity, not just payment. Meanwhile, a search engine, discovery-based platform like ShopStyle has the advantage of users who mainly open the app with intent to buy.

There remains a place for well designed, well working mobile retail apps, Mark Tack, VP of marketing at mobile marketing firm Vibes, told Retail Dive last year. But their limits can be taken up by these mobile wallets, and retailers should not shirk either.

“Retailers ask, ‘What role should my app play?’ and our take is ‘You need both,’” he says. “It’s a symbiotic role. But all marketing roads lead to mobile wallet.” That’s because, Tack says, the mobile wallet organizes everything in one place, few if any shoppers will be hitting individual retailer apps with such frequency, and, importantly, users seldom delete the content from their mobile wallets.

PopSugar takes about 15% for each transaction, has a network of some 14,000 partner blogs and fashion or gossip websites, and works with retail partners as diverse as Target, Nicole Miller, Neiman Marcus, Express, and Topshop.

Sugar told the Wall Street Journal that, while it’s true that the company’s ambitions put it in competition with Amazon, the e-retail giant’s strength is in consumer goods rather than PopSugar’s forte, fashion. 

“Our brands are different,” Sugar told the Journal. “We think there is an opportunity to become the iTunes or App Store of fashion and accessories,” he also told the paper.