Tinyview Takes On mShopping With Simplicity

By Ben Carsley, Writer/Editor (@BC_PYMNTS)

There is nothing especially unique about Tinyview’s design, functionality or purpose.

You scroll through “trending” products. You scroll through lists of eCommerce partners. You scroll through lists of products you create. It’s a simple app with simple features, but in many ways, that works in Tinyview’s favor. Because despite the beautiful layouts or bells and whistles or gamification aspects we see in other mShopping apps all the time, perhaps a bit more simplicity is just what mobile shopping needs.

The concept behind Tinyview is – you guessed it – simple. Rather than serve as a shopping comparison site or an all-in-one checkout page, it pretty much just sits on top of many of the most common mobile shopping sites of interest to consumers today. That might not seem terribly useful at first, but when you consider the two mCommerce hassles such functionality eliminates – the need to download individual merchant apps and to enter store URLs on tiny mobile browsers – the appeal starts to become more obvious.

To really use Tinyview, you need to first set up a “wallet” in the app with your personal and shipping information and card information of your choice. Once you do so (on an iPhone at least), Tinyview gives you an “autofill” option every time you hit a browser-based checkout page: a useful tool for anyone who’s ever entered that much information on a small screen before. Users can set up a standard four-digit PIN to protect their information, with verification needed after a user-defined period of dormancy.

So now that we’ve gone over how you make purchases with Tinyview, how does the app help you decide what it is you should be buying?

To be honest: not much. Tinyview isn’t really an mShopping app as much as it’s a mCommerce app, in my opinion. The “trending” tab in Tinyview is cool but unoriginal. Visually it has a Fancy-style layout, and the products displayed are a mix of unique, small-store items and major retail offerings. For impulse buyers this could be fun, and the ability to save and list products you like is nice as well.

Yet from what I experienced, the best way to use Tinyview is to already know what you want to buy. Tinyview offers an impressive list of merchants right off the bat: the likes of Amazon, Best Buy, Domino’s, Gap, Home Depot, Staples, Target, Victoria’s Secret and Walmart are just some of the big-name merchants to select from on the “stores” tab. You can also add merchant websites to the “my stores” list by entering a description and a URL, meaning Tinyview isn’t limited to serving only those who shop at its partners.

For review purposes, I decided to buy the Xbox 360 game MLB 2K13 from Best Buy. I had to type in the product name on Best Buy’s site after selecting it from the Tinyview menu, and I had to type in my Best Buy login information for the store to recognize my account. That’s all the typing I had to do, though, and Tinyview saves your usernames and passwords for all the eCommerce sites you visit, meaning I’ll never have to log in to Best Buy again upon future visits.

Once I found the product, I selected autofill for my shipping and payments information, selected by shipping method, hit confirm, and I was done. If you have an eCommerce site you use frequently and go through Tinyview, you can probably buy items pretty consistently in a 20-30 second period, assuming you have a decent wireless or network connection.

For Tinyview to truly function to its full potential, you need to sync it with your Facebook account. Personally, I hate this aspect of Tinyview, and of all mobile apps in general. If I want to separate my social and shopping lives I should be able to, and while I technically can with this app, much of its usefulness – saving items, sharing lists, etc – ceases to function if the app stands alone.

But that gripe aside, Tinyview is in many ways the perfect mCommerce app for the lazy man. If you’re intent on bargain hunting or finding unique and beautiful products, you’re better off looking elsewhere. For the consumer who knows just what they want and wants to buy it on the go, doing so through Tinyview is significantly easier than through a regular browser, or through many of the other shopping apps out there.

Sometimes in the mCommerce world, less is more. Tinyview gets that.