The snow falling outside the windows of our Chicago office reminds me that the holiday shopping season is ALMOST here, and with each year the shopping culture is changing with technological advancements. Shopping can be a form of therapy, to some, while an utter nightmare to others, and retailers are striving to utilize the devices in everyone’s comfort zone to enhance the shopping experience. Elements like Apple iBeacon are entering the retail game as consumers are increasingly turning to mobile enhance their in-store retail experience. On the other hand, creating amazing mobile retail experiences for those consumers not physically in the store is important too, and there’s a lot of buzz around today’s announcement that Flipboard is launching it’s very own shopping experience.

For those of you unfamiliar with Flipboard, it’s an application for tablets and smartphones that aggregates users’ social-media content and presents the content in a beautiful magazine-like layout—where readers actually ‘flip’ through their stuff like their flipping through a guilty-pleasure celeb gossip magazine. It has a user-base of over 90 million strong—that’s a whole lot of potential customers.

Studies have shown that 52% of tablet users prefer to shop on this device rather than a PC, and further 8/10 consumers intend to do a little mCommerce in the not so far future. What is Flipboard doing to harness some of that potential retail power? They’re giving users the power to “discover, collect, and buy products via Flipboard and create your own catalogs.” Brands and users alike can easily create their own Flipboard zines, full of products tailored to whatever theme, season, need, etc., we wish.

It’ll be interesting to see how the Flipboard catalogs play out with integrating with other sites for payments (bouncing users from Flipboard to the actual brand site for purchase, I smell huge advertising incentives!)—but on blustery nights like this, perusing mCatalogs from the comfort of my cozy couch seems like a winner to me.