Vitacost.com, Inc., an online retailer of health and wellness products, today announced a new digital platform for tablet devices that revolutionizes the shopping experience for consumers. Consumers visiting discovery.vitacost.com via an iPad or iPad Mini can opt to take advantage of the new platform's intuitive swipe-and-drag functionality and proprietary "browsing bubbles" to shop the company's extensive selection of nearly 40,000 healthy-living products. The new digital platform offers consumers the best of both worlds by providing the emotional and exploratory feel of a brick-and-mortar shopping experience through a tablet browser.
Vitacost's new digital platform relies on information navigation points, known as browsing bubbles, to provide shoppers with product-specific information such as ingredients and dietary attributes to help with their purchasing decisions. The browsing bubbles also highlight links to similar products, enticing customers to delve further and discover additional goods to add to their shopping basket, thus stimulating impulse buying. A proprietary "sprinkler algorithm" encourages additional product discovery and exploration by randomly selecting categories and brands to "sprinkle" into the shopping flow. Consumers seeking the traditional Vitacost.com shopping experience on their tablets have the ability to toggle back and forth between the two platforms.
"Our goal was to make the online shopping experience more interactive and fun for our customers, mirroring that of a traditional retail store," stated David Zucker, Chief Marketing Officer of Vitacost.com. "Consumers using our new digital platform are offered an endless array of product suggestions through the browsing bubbles, increasing awareness of the vast selection of products and brands that Vitacost carries -- such as gluten-free foods, cruelty-free personal care products, vitamins, supplements and non-GMO products. We are very excited to launch this new platform as it couples the positive, emotional aspects of shopping in a traditional retail store, with the ease and convenience of online shopping."
