Target, Gap and Old Navy are among the retailers whose discounted merchandise can be found and purchased via the new mobile shopping app TapBuy Deals.

TapBuy Deals lets consumers shop sale items from retailers, local offers from deal sites such as Groupon and also finds discount codes to apply to purchases. The app uses a streamlined checkout process so that users can complete their purchases with just a few taps.

“In mobile commerce, one of the biggest problems is that it is really hard to buy – the failure rate is like 80 percent,” said Blake Scholl, CEO of Kima Labs, San Francisco.

“TapBuy is the first mobile shopping app that has a checkout built-in that is really fast and easy to use,” he said.

“The ability to buy on the go is big — that’s a big differentiator.”

Many deals
TapBuy automatically crawls the Web sites for retailers such as Gap, Target, Best Buy, Toys R Us and others to look for the items with the biggest discounts, even unadvertised specials.

The app also tracks coupons and discount codes and automatically applies them to an order when an offer is available.

Finally, TapBuy aggregates local deals from deals sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial.

Currently, over 100 brands are featured on TapBuy with more being added every week.

Users can personalize TapBuy by including only the brands and deals that interest them.

TapBuy Deals is available for the iPhone and iPod touch in the App Store.

The only time TapBuy shoppers need to enter their credit card information is the first time they use the app.

For users who do not want to type in their credit card information, the app can also scan credit cards with the built-in camera in the iPhone.

TapBuy securely stores a user’s credit card and shipping preferences. Users can place an order by touching the TapBuy button and confirming their personal identification number, with the entire process taking less than 10 seconds.

TapBuy uses cloud technology to securely forward the order and payment information to the merchant.

On the backend, when someone places an order, TapBuy launches a virtual Web browser for the merchant using cloud technology and automatically enters all of the order information.

“From the retailer’s perspective, it just got another Web order while from the consumer’s perspective, it was a really fast ordering experience,” Mr. Scholl said.

The app is being promoted via mobile ads and inside other apps.

Kima Labs is also working on several development deals to allow the TapBuy checkout to work in other apps.

A big focus for Kima Labs when it was developing TapBuy was eliminating as many keystrokes as possible in the checkout process. For example, users only need to enter their ZIP code, not their city and state as well.

“Checkout is a really interesting and difficult thing to get right in mobile,” Mr. Scholl said.

“One piece is making the consumer experience really simple,” he said.

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