Tips on Using Gamification in Your Ecommerce Mobile App: Aliexpress Example

Adults enjoy playing just as kids do, especially if they can save some money in process. Retail applications provide lots of opportunities to enjoy games and challenges, and in exchange they get loyalty, higher retention rate, engagement and greater revenue.

Gamification is a marketing strategy that works for many types of businesses beginning with education and social media to retail. We will talk about it in our article.

A good choice of products, convenient checkout with an optimal mobile payment gateway and customer service is not enough for a modern retail app. Ecommerce app gamification allows your brand to stand out from the crowd and attract users to your application.

According to P&S market research, $22 million will be the evaluation of the gamification market that will show a rise of 41.8% annually. Another study shows that 87% of ecommerce shops in US are planning about using gamification as a part of their strategy, and the biggest companies actually already use it.

To keep up, you should also make it a part of your business model, and in this article we will explore the psychology of gamification the ways to use it properly so it brings the most profit.

Benefits of Gamification

Let’s talk more about why gamification in e-commerce applications is so beneficial and how other apps manage to get the most from it. We will show you some examples of gamification in ecommerce app.

1.User engagement

The secret of gamification lies in addressing inner nature of every person: strive to challenges, achievements and entertainment. If used properly, it hits all the goals and makes the user truly engaged in the whole process of playing, getting rewards and then spending them on your products.

Example:

Aliexpress is great at engaging users with their app. Games are one of the most special and prominent features in Aliexpress. Personal preferences are key here: while one game is oriented on long-term results, the other is all about fun and luck.

2.High retention rate

Daily challenges or coupons are what make users return to the app again and again, even without planning to purchase anything. As many customers purchase something in an ecommerce shop only once and then leave the app, owners of ecommerce stores often find it very hard to return customers to their apps. The answer is gamifying the UX.

Example:

The main currency that can be exchanged for coupons in Aliexpress are coins, and each day the user enters the app, one coin is presented. Daily tasks are one of several ways to gain more coins, and that motivates users to return each day.

There are many options to choose from, like daily tasks or a game Lucky Forest that also encourages regular interaction with the app.

3.Building a community

Gamification is often tied to social media. Competition is a very important part of a gaming process: it makes people more eager to win, and sharing achievements is a great motivating factor.

Also, social media can help to promote your business – nobody can do it better than your customers. Reward them for sharing information, following influencers within your community and creating user-generated content.

Reviews of the products are extremely important for modern ecommerce, as people have no opportunity to hold the product in their hands like they would do in brick and mortar shops. Reviews is their only way to know that they will get what they want. According to statistics, 88% of customer decisions about adding a product to cart were influenced by reviews.

Example:

Aliexpress uses daily tasks to build a strong community around their ecommerce platform. Look at the tasks they offer to complete to get coins:

Each task involves taking part in the life of the community and sharing reviews, that will later allow you to sell more.

With gamification, you can:

• Get to know user behaviour
• See user reaction to any changes and new approaches
• Personalize your interaction with a customer
• Develop brand loyalty
• Increase repeat sales

This is why retail companies love gamification. It leads to positive experience, and according to Walker Info, the most important success factor for retail will be not the price or the product itself, but the user experience. This is the thing that will determine whether people will trust your brand and buy your products.

Tips on Using Gamification

How to use gamification properly, so it brings the most benefit to your business? We have several tips for you, that will help you understand the direction.

The first thing to know, is that any type of gamification consists of three important steps:

• Challenge
• Instructions
• Reward

Without a challenge the user won’t be engaged with a game. Instructions help to understand the rules and avoid any obstacles or misunderstandings. Reward is the goal of the whole process, and the user needs to know about it beforehand, as it’s the biggest motivator.

The first step you’ll need to make before you start to develop a strategy, is to determine your goal. Adding a bonus system or a game without a clear understanding of what you want to achieve, won’t result in anything.

Think thoroughly about what you want. Possible goals may be:

• Higher retention rate
• More time spent in the app
• Bigger revenue
• Greater average order value
• More user-generated content

These and many other goals can be achieved with the help of gamification, and after you determine what your expectations are, you’ll be able to create the gamification strategy.

Each type of gamification can help to achieve different results. Let’s talk about them in more details.

Daily bonuses – increase retention rate. Users can get them only if they visit the app every day. For example, Aliexpress gives one bonus a day, and also allows to earn more by completing tasks.

Badges – help to differentiate the users according to their achievements. Badges determine the privileges and motivate users to get more of them.

Likes and Follows – are connected with building a community around your brand. You can reward the users with bonuses, points or coins that they will later exchange for coupons.

Games – increase engagement and allow users to get even more coins. Develop some simple, yet interesting games with clear rules and reward system, and motivate users to try them. Games are one of the best ways to get users spend more time in your app.

Competitions – also work for creating social interaction and promoting your business. Competitions motivate users to share their achievements in social media and achieve higher results.

Go way ahead of your competitors and think about using gamification in ecommerce apps along with modern trends like AR. With the release of ARKit from Apple and ARCore from Google there appeared lots of possibilities for startups and development companies like Mobindustry to implement AR games both in apps and in brick-and-mortar stores.

Following trends mindfully can make your brand bright and successful, you should definitely look into spicing your ecommerce mobile app with some games and challenges.