The Mall: Bringing Online Shopping Malls to Your Phone

The mall is making a comeback, but not in brick-and-mortar form. Instead, a startup called ‘The Mall’ is bringing the concept online with an innovative app that lets users create their own personalized virtual malls from their favorite brands and track sales in one place.

Addressing the Fragmented Online Shopping Landscape

The idea itself may not be entirely new, but its timing feels more urgent than ever. As customers face a fragmented online shopping landscape, it has become harder to keep up with their favorite brands. Co-founder and COO Ellie Konsker was inspired by this challenge at her first startup, a sustainable fashion marketplace. ‘Consumers were shopping across 20 tabs at once, signing up for newsletters, and trying to piece together information in real time,’ she said. ‘It’s hard, and it makes shopping a very frustrating process.’

A Unique Approach

The Mall’s co-founder, Sreya Halder, who has a background in computer science from Stanford, connected with Konsker through a female founders circle in Los Angeles. Together, they decided to build an app similar to Spotify, but for shopping. At launch, users create their virtual mall by adding their favorite brands upon signing up and immediately track any changes. The Mall’s current database includes over 10,000 brands, with the option to add any other brand simply by sharing its Instagram or TikTok account.

How It Works

The app uses technology to scrape retail websites, pulling in entire catalogs and tracking product and pricing information within its own system. This scraping is frequent enough to keep an eye out for sales, restocks, drops, and other promotions, which it then alerts users via push notifications. When users are ready to buy, a browser page opens inside the app, taking them directly to the brand’s e-commerce site to check out. The company says there’s no traditional affiliate model involved; instead, The Mall is meant to work more as a discovery tool.

Privacy and Personalization

Users can choose to have their collections of brands discoverable by others or kept private. As users build their collections, they can also discover possible lower-priced alternatives to specific products. ‘You can look at a piece and then see what is similar to this piece across any brand in the world,’ Konsker explained.

Business Model

The Mall plans to make money by building a data tool for brands that will allow them to analyze their clicks, look at how other brands are thinking about their seasonal assortments, and help them plan. ‘Over time, we see those two paths crossing, where once we have enough shoppers on our consumer product, then it becomes a really great advertising platform for brands to have sponsored billboards and…weekly or monthly subscriptions, where they show up in these recommendations and in your feed,’ Halder said.

Upcoming Launch

The app is currently in early beta testing with 4,500 testers and will launch on an invite-only referral basis as it slowly scales. The Mall should be broadly available by the end of the summer. For now, interested users can sign up for invites through their network or waitlists.