Coffee Table, a retail catalog aggregate app for iPad, is the latest mobile service to offer holiday shoppers special incentives as a way to drive adoption.

Last week, last-minute holiday shoppers who browsed or made a purchase via the Coffee Table app had a chance to win daily prizes and one grand prize. The Every Day’s a Holiday promotion ran through Dec. 25.

The promotion comes at a time when mobile shopping is up significantly and retailers as well as a growing selection of mobile apps and daily deals services are trying to entice shoppers with special offers, prizes and deals.  

For example, Amazon recently offered consumers a $5 discount to anyone who used its price comparison app while in a store.

Others followed suit with Groupon offering a $10 credit for the first 150,000 people who purchased a local Groupon by Dec. 24 and EBay providing shoppers with a $10 coupon good toward an in-store purchase at Toys R Us when they spent $100 at the retailer’s eBay store and used PayPal to pay for their purchase.

Product sharing
There is some question as to the benefit these offers have for retailers, especially in the case of the Amazon discount which was designed to draw shoppers away from in-store purchasing.

However, since a catalog shopping app such as Coffee Table is not pulling shoppers away from a store but enhancing the shopping experience for dedicated catalog shoppers, this promotion could help drive additional sales for catalogers while driving adoption for the app.

Coffee Table delivers catalogs from leading retailers to its free iPad app. The app offers a secure direct checkout that can be accomplished in two taps.

The holiday promotion offered daily prizes of up to $100 and a grand prize of a $5,000 shopping spree.

The promotion is designed to showcase product sharing, which enables user to share a favorite product with their friends. It is one of the new features in the latest release of the app.

In addition to share with a friend functionality, the latest version of Coffee Table includes customizable catalog subscriptions, enhanced product images, an exclusive deals screen and an interactive, rotating library of the latest featured catalogs.

Coffee Table also offers exclusive deals for its shoppers every week.

Developers of retail mobile apps are responding to the growing expectation among consumers for deals and special offers created by Groupon and other daily deals sites by showcasing their own promotions.

However, with so many offers from so many different sources, the potential is there for consumers to become confused.

The promotional environment also presents a challenge for retailers who must manage their own offers as well as offers through different daily deals sites.

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