Zoomingo and Pinterest – Enhancing Your Online Shopping Experience
00.jpg” alt=”" width=”284″ height=”300″ />We wrote about shopping app development company Zoomingo a few weeks ago. Zoomingo’s goal is to tailor local and online deals to a customers unique set of preferences. It’s a cool idea from a company looking to add value to the sometimes frustrating experience of shopping.
We had a chance last week to exchange e-mails with Shirish Nadkarni, CEO of Zoomingo, and he filled us in on just how they’re using Pinterest to enhance their process even more.
GetPinterested: In a way it sounds like Zoomingo is looking to build the largest living catalog on the internet. What’s the goal for Zoomingo?
Shirish Nadkarni – Zoomingo CEO and Co-Founder: Our goal actually is not to build the largest shopping catalog on the internet. There are many companies out there that provide a very large catalog of online items. However, most shoppers have to spend hours browsing through various online sites trying to find attractive items at great prices. We add value to our users by trying to understand their profile and preferences and delivering great local and online deals that they will love and save money at the same time. And with users having now access to smartphones all the time, we are letting them discover the best deals where they are.
GP: How does Pinterest fit into that goal?
SN: As we all know, Pinterest has become an amazing new social media phenomena that people are using to pin their favorite items. Our research shows that roughly 30% of all Pinterest pins are shopping related. Pinterest, as a result, has become a powerful curation mechanism to identify the most popular shopping items that shoppers are discovering on the net. Through our new Pinterest integration feature, we are now allowing shoppers to discover the most desirable shopping items and get sale alerts when these items drop in price.
GP: What’s unique about how Zoomingo is integrating Pinterest?
SN: Zoomingo provides a very useful shopping experience on top of Pinterest. Today, Pinterest users are pinning all types of items on their pinboards. As a result, it is hard for someone to find items that are just shopping related and search for specific items based on certain criteria. With our Pinterest integration feature, shoppers can not only discover the most popular shopping items but also search for items based on category (i.e. Women>Clothing>Dresses), store, brand, price and discount. We have done the hard work to automatically categorize all the Pinterest shopping items along these parameters. In addition, users can “watch” any item for price drops and we will send them instant sale alerts notifying them of the sale. Users can provide us their Pinterest IDs and we will search their account for shopping items and start watching them as well for price drops. Any new pins that they add to their Pinboards will also be automatically watched.
GP: What sort of filters are available? Would I be able to sort Pinterest products by brand and then by price for example?
SN: Users can search by category, store, brand, price and discount as well as keyword. The search results are automatically refined as you keep applying additional filters.
GP: Will people be able to see things that are popular locally on Pinterest?
SN: Today most people are pinning items from online sites. However, given that Zoomingo allows shoppers to discover local items they will now be able to pin these local items to their Pinboards allowing other Pinterest users to discover the local items as well.
GP: When did you realize how useful Pinterest could be as a shopping tool?
SN: After we launched Zoomingo, users told us that they loved our application for the local sales information that we provide. However, they also wanted us to show them great online deals. As we thought about the problem, we were concerned about the massive increase in items that we would display on mobile devices. We felt that it was important to curate all the deals out there to allow users to discover the best deals. As we looking for a solution to this problem, we hit upon the idea of utilizing Pinterest as the curation mechanism given the massive increase that it was experience in its user base (therefore, creating a bigger army of people who could hunt down the best items). We could then apply our unique search, categorization and tracking engine to identify when the most popular items went on sale.
GP: Does involving Pinterest give you the opportunity to increase user interaction, already a very important part of the shopping process online?
SN: Absolutely. We are now allowing users to discover the hottest items on the net through our Pinterest integration. In addition, we are staying in touch with our by sending out sale alerts which bring them back to our site. In any week, about 10% of the items are going on sale so we have plenty of opportunity to engage our users.
We thank Shirish once again for taking the time to chat with us. Check out Zoomingo today!
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