Mobile coupons enter the Black Friday battle on Android

Celebrity-backed mobile coupon service Yowza!! is taking advantage of the day that’s in it. As the retail war that is Black Friday gets under way, Yowza!! is publicising the special coupons it is carrying for today - but also taking the opportunity to announce that for the first time the service is available on Android.

What’s Yowza!!?

Yowza!! is a free application for iPhone and Android devices. Once you’ve got it downloaded, it will deliver location relevant coupons direct to your device. It’s not an aggregator of existing coupons - it relies on merchants placing their coupons on the service. From there the service is location specific. If you’re a user of Yowza!!, you can simply request to view all of the coupons for stores within a short distance of you. The coupons themselves work just the same as a paper coupon - except that they display on the screen of your device instead of being printed.

Up until now, Yowza!! was only available to iPhone and iPod Touch users. But today has seen the app come to Android for the first time - and Blackberry / Palm launches are expected in the near future.

A big part of the Yowza!! philosophy is that you should be able to get deals through Yowza!! that you can’t get anywhere else. So the merchant partners of Yowza!! will be giving a certain number of special offers exclusively to the mobile channel. And seeing as there are more than 200 merchants, with over 10,000 retail locations, signed up to Yowza!!, you’ll probably get at least a few good deals.

What we think?

“Retail holidays” like Black Friday and the New Year sales are the perfect time to push the shopping potential of mobile devices. Services like Yowza!! (and other couponing applications like it) can be invaluable to consumers who are running around the streets looking for bargains. This is where mobile can really shine - a decent shopping application will genuinely remove a lot of the stress from the day, and that is something that users want.