The popular coupon site RetailMeNot launched its mobile site earlier this year and today, the company is launching its first native app for iOS. The new app allows users who don’t like to pay full price to find online and in-store coupons. Users get access to curated lists of popular coupons and “hot deals.” They can also bookmark coupons for what the company calls “time-shift shopping.” According to the company’s own data, its site already gets about 17% of its traffic from mobile users. Its mobile channel, says the company’s CEO Cotter Cunnigham, is growing “by 200% every month year-over-year.”
Despite the company’s renewed emphasis on mobile, the app doesn’t allow you to discover coupons around you. Maybe that will come in a later version, but given that RetailMeNot itself argues that 35% of adults report that they are more inclined to make a purchase in a brick-and-mortar store when they have a coupon in hand, this feels like an odd omission. The app itself, though, is very well designed and makes it easy to find coupons thanks to its predictive search feature.
The company stresses that this is just its first foray into native mobile apps and that it plans to significantly improve its app with new features in the near future. Earlier this year, as our own Josh Constine reported, RetailMeNot announced that it would soon allow users to integrate their credit card information with their coupons. Instead of having to use offline coupons, users who choose to opt in to this feature will soon be able to simply select the coupons they want to use online or on the go and head to a store without having to print anything or show their virtual coupon. The coupon will then be applied silently at checkout. To offer this service, RetailMeNot partnered with CardSpring. For the time being, though, this service remains in beta and isn’t integrated into the mobile app yet.
To celebrate today’s release, RetailMeNot also commissioned a study that looked at how U.S. consumers use their mobile phones to shop. Judging from the results of this study, there is still quite some room left for mobile coupons to grow. Only about one in five respondents, for example, said that they have used a coupon they found using their mobile device while shopping in-store. One in seven, however, said that they have made an online purchase from their mobile device while shopping in a physical store because they found a better price online.