Hipster shoppers, rejoice. You can do all your Etsy holiday shopping for those one-of-a-kind crafts on your iPhone, or any mobile phone with a proper browser for that matter. Etsy just launched its iPhone app, along with a new mobile website.
You can browse everything from arty crochet, knitting, and quilts to handmade children’s clothes and jewlery. Just like on the regular handcrafted marketplace. Both the iPhone app and the mobile site feature large photos of the items to make visual browsing easy. You can search by tags, or regular keyword, or browse by category.
The app has some well-thought out social sharing features also. Any item can be shared via Twitter, Facebook, email, or SMS. The app encourages you to sign in with your Etsy ID so that you can favorite items and add them to your cart. And of course, you can shop straight from your phone.
The search is actually really deep for a mobile app. If you search for “hats” for instance, you just keep getting an infinite scroll of new hats (mostly knit hats, for some reason). Then you can filter the search by location (buy local!), price, relevance, or recency.
Etsy sellers can also use the app to manage their shops, see what items are selling, get alerts, and even make minor updates.
Yup, mobile commerce is going to be big this holiday season.