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Consistent with Etsy's image, its iPhone app is user-made — and gaining steam.
The handmade and vintage ecommerce site's official iPhone app, which launched in November, is based on an unofficial app that was entered in its API contest last spring. It's been downloaded 1 million times since launch, the company announced Friday.
Visits per month on the app have grown between 25% and 60% in each month, and users average 30 page views per visit.
Nothing about these numbers necessarily makes us want to write home (an app called Draw Something recently reached 1 million downloads in about 10 days), but it is evidence that Etsy is catching up with its mobile presence — with Etsy character.
"Why not, as a place to start building your iOS app, look at what the community does?" Etsy Director of Product Leland Rechis tells Mashable about the decision to hold an API contest in the first place. "We didn't have an app, but we had a marketplace of apps."
Etsy hired the designer who created the winning unofficial app using its API to help remodel it. Rechis says he never expected to find the company's first iOS developer during the contest, but doing so was the initial step to creating Etsy's first mobile app in just three months. At the time the developer, Jey Bidduph, was hired, Etsy didn't even have a mobile website. It launched its first in July.
By contrast, eBay reported $5 billion in retail volume from mobile phones in 2011. If you're not playing scrabble, Ebay is nothing like Etsy, but the company's open books demonstrate that mobile commerce is on the rise.
An Etsy spokesperson said its mobile app engagement beats its online engagement, but declined to comment on whether that engagement translated into transactions. The company does, however, have plans to craft an Android app.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, MKucova
More About: apps, Etsy, Mobile
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