• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, December 1, 2011

Office supply and service chain Staples is turning its signature Easy Button into a full-featured mobile shopping accelerator with its 2.0 version iPhone app. Released yesterday into the iOS App Store, the redesigned tool is packed with functionality: shopping, code scanning, list making, product comparisons, inventory checks, loyalty card maintenance and rewards, and coupon clipping.

The company understands that the mobile platform is critical to their category and clientele. Staples is investing heavily in the R&D required to keep up with the mobile use cases. “We are tripling the size of our e-commerce team, and mobile is at the tip of the spear,” says Brian Tilzer, vice president, ecommerce and business development.

Development of the app began almost nine months ago with some foundational ethnographic research. “We studied customers in offices, on the go and in the store to find out the things that were difficult and wasted time, and we used that as a basis for the feature set,” says Tilzer. 

For the small business target, the most urgent trips to Staples often involve emergency replacements of a spent printer cartridge, so the company designed an entire area of the app just for that. In addition, the app allows users to store their past purchases to identify the correct model. 

When Staples redesigned its mobile Web site several months ago, it saw customer adoption of mobile accelerate quickly. “We have been seeing a significant increase in usage of mobile as a way to view our emails,” says Tilzer, “so it was critical that we had a mobile site.” He says the share of their overall Web traffic coming to the mobile site exceeds some of the recent benchmarks from the holiday shopping season, which have mobile accounting for about 14% of Internet activity.

The challenge for a brand trying to make a tool that fits into a small business workflow is that there are multiple use cases. “We needed to optimize around different scenarios for use.” The app allows for synchronizing shopping list construction across desktop and app so a customer can start a shopping list on the PC and have that in-process list show up in-store in the app. The code scan feature can be used at the office to create a list of items that are running low and need refreshing.

In fact, while elements are designed for accessing the brand while on the go, the app has a specific in-store mode that kicks in if the user checks in at a Staples retail location. Different features come to the fore, such as earning coupons. A loyalty rewards and coupon wallet aggregates the best offers a user can take advantage of while in the store.

The next stage for retailers like Staples will be a kind of convergence of what they have been building in these silos over the years, Tilzer says. “We have 2,000 stores and thousands of call centers and online assets -- and now mobile. We are making a major investment in bringing together our channels around making office products easy.”

Staples will be promoting the new app across its channels, and especially with its loyalty program members. Tilzer says that once the app is used by a customer, he observes a “a real addictive quality,” prompting them not only to come back for more but to turn the mobile experience into their basic way of engaging with the brand. Android users can expect the upgraded app in the Marketplace within weeks. A new video from Staples outlines the feature set for all versions.