Apple’s Store update takes retail to the metaverse

Apple has updated its website with the reintroduction of an easy-to-find “Store” section and I can’t help but wonder why it was ever made harder to find in an earlier site redesign.

Sales didn’t stop

Sales didn’t stop when Apple redesigned its site and made the store a more discreet space. To get to it, you’d either use a link in the site menu, a link at the bottom of the page, or via the “Buy” button on any product page.

However, as Apple’s business becomes increasingly online, it’s not especially surprising the company would choose to make it easy to find its online shopping mall. While the rationale for the earlier discretion was likely to reflect that Apple’s an experience company, not a sales company, that schtick became harder to accept once sales broke a trillion dollars.

Changing direction?

It is, however, interesting to consider whether the change will be matched by a move to transform Apple’s retail stores into more sales-driven operations.

I hope this isn’t so. One of the key elements to those stores since the beginning has been a focus on identifying what people need, rather than on sales.

“You can feel what the Apple brand is by the experience you have in the space. Now, more companies see their stores as brand touch points, rather than just a transaction space,” Tim Kobe, who helped design the first Apple retail stores, said in 2019.