Apple Eliminates Its Online Store, Moves “Buy” Buttons To Product Pages

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No more option for “Store,” but you can still buy online.

Before you start to panic at the headline, no, you will not have to physically go to an Apple store to get whatever gadgets your heart desires. Although Apple did remove its online store directory from its previous home of “store.apple.com,” you can still purchase products from the company on the web. It just looks a bit different now.

The way things used to work, Apple had a separate Store tab at the top of its homepage, next to sections for its products like Mac, iPad, Watch etc. Each of those pages contained information and specs on products, but when it came time to buy them, you’d be sent to the Store.

The old way.

But as you can see in the photo at the top of this post, there’s (gasp!) no more Store, and store.apple.com just redirects to Apple.com. Though that might at first be confusing, the new way of organizing the site is actually a bit more intuitive: Now when you want to buy an iPhone, say, you click on the iPad section and get not only specs and information about the device, but also a “buy” button that takes you to a page to check out plans, different phones, FAQ and, Apple hopes, actually buy it.

If you should decide you want to buy an iPad while you’re in the iPhone section, you navigate over to that product’s page, instead of remaining within an online store, while a shopping bag icon in the top right corner keeps track of what you’ve got in there.

In essence, the whole site is Apple’s online store.

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist