As consumers increasingly enlist mobile to help with their holiday shopping needs, applications such as Zoomingo are introducing new features, including Passbook and Pinterest integration, to keep users coming back.

The Zoomingo helps users find the best deals at local retailers. For its latest update, the app is introducing several new features, including support for Apple’s Passbook digital wallet, enabling offers to be automatically displayed when a user enters a store.

“Mobile apps are increasingly playing a very important role during the holiday season to help shoppers discover great deals being offered by various retailers,” said Shirish Nadkarni, CEO of Zoomingo, Seattle, WA.

“If you look at the top 25 shopping apps on Google Play – Zoomingo is in the top 25 itself – most of the top 25 apps are focused on helping shoppers find great deals,” he said. “The data from Black Friday also showed that over 60 percent of shoppers were using their mobile phone to discover deals during the week of Thanksgiving.

“We experienced this phenomenon ourselves with record downloads and engagement in November. Our users, for example, viewed and voted on over 2.3 million items during the month of November.”

Deals simplified
Zoomingo identifies the best deals at over 80 national retailers, such as Macy’s, Walmart, Toys R Us and others. The app leverages the GPS on a user’s phone locate nearby deals.

Users can save deals and coupons to a shopping list and lets users watch online items and be automatically notified when it drops in price.

With the latest update to the app, users can now save store offers and coupons to their Apple Passbook. Since the deals are geofenced, they will automatically display on users’ smartphones when they visit a store offering the deal or coupon.

Android users receive alerts when they visit a mall that highlights the deals available at the mall and items they have saved to their shopping list.

Other new features intended to make holiday shopping easier include a new Gift Picks section, where users will find the most popular discounted gift items selected from over 2.3 million item votes by the Zoomingo community in the last 30 days.

The new Sales Events section highlights storewide sales and coupons from retailers.

The latest markdowns
The app also features a new Pinterest integration enabling users to view the most popular items on Pinterest that have not gone on sale yet and start price watching them. Zoomingo will automatically send shoppers an alert when the item goes on sales.

Additionally, users can find the items that have gone on sale in the last 24 hours in the Today’s Markdowns sections.

“Apple’s Passbook makes it very easy for users to save store offers and coupons and be automatically reminded when you visit the store,” Mr. Nadkarni said.

“In the old days, users had to go through the trouble of finding and clipping coupons or sale flyers and taking them to the store,” he said. “Now Zoomingo does all the work for you to discover all the great deals in one place.

“With the Passbook integration, users can now save a particular store offer to their Passbook and have it automatically pop up when they visit the store.”

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York