Zoomingo, a mobile marketing app that alerts shoppers to sales at local stores, has updated its app to integrate with the growing online social network Pinterest.

Shoppers are now able to use the app and Zoomingo web site to find both online items that users have pinned on Pinterest as well as items on sale available from local retailers. Pinterest users can get sale alerts for items they have pinned and also for other popular online items that others have pinned on the social network. Additionally, shoppers can sort items on Pinterest through Zoomingo’s app and site by both popularity—how many times they have been pinned—and price at 100 retailers that have a presence on Pinterest. Those retailers include Target Nordstrom and Macy’s.

Shoppers also can browse or search Pinterest via Zoomingo for any item they want by category, store and brand. Additionally, a Watch It feature lets shoppers get sale alerts for any online items they have pinned on Pinterest. Zoomingo tracks users’ pinned items and notifies them when any item has gone on sale.

“By zooming in on the most popular items and sales from Pinterest, Zoomingo allows shoppers to benefit from the tremendous social curation that’s taking place on Pinterest,” says Shirish Nadkarni, CEO and co-founder of Zoomingo. “With Zoomingo’s new Watch It feature they can get sale alerts for their favorite pins and start saving money immediately.”

The new Pinterest feature works both with Zoomingo’s Android and iPhone apps, which are free for users. The app also remembers consumers’ store preferences, tracks Pinterest pins and alerts consumers of sales it thinks they might be interested in.

Zoomingo, which started as a shopping app that alerted consumers to sales at local bricks-and-mortar stores, gets access to store sales by parsing catalogs that a number of local retailers publish on a regular basis. It also has a community of users who regularly post sales to the mobile app as they shop. Users get points for posting sales and Zoomingo raffles off a weekly prize to the top 50 point earners. Zoomingo gets its online prices from Pinterest where users are pinning items that they like from various e-commerce sites. With the Pinterest update, Nadkarni says Zoomingo users will see local items on sale mixed in with the online Pinterest items.

“Currently, 30% or so of shopping-related items on Pinterest are on sale,” Nadkarni says. “Last week 10% of the items that we were watching dropped in price. The average savings was $88, representing almost 40% savings from the original price. So we expect our users to benefit from significant savings on their favorite Pinterest items through Zoomingo.”

For consumers out and about shopping at bricks-and-mortar retailers, the app also uses geolocation to display sales at shops nearby that a consumer may be interested in based on her shopping history and preferences.

Nadkarni says Zoomingo is starting to monetize its app through a combination of advertising and affiliate fees. In addition, he says Zoomingo plans to start charging retailers for driving foot traffic into their local stores.

 

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