Stay Engaging in an Already-Crowded Ecommerce Market

As the eCommerce market welcomes thousands of newcomers every day, a Japanese company leverages gamification to maintain its competitive edge.

About the Client

Retail & eCommerce

Mobile app

This article describes a real-life project. However, we can not disclose our client’s name for privacy purposes.

The retail company has been using online channels to drive more sales for several years. Developing a mobile app has significantly helped them with their marketing promotion campaign & customer loyalty rates.

Project Overview

Industry

Retail & eCommerce

Technology

IoT, AWS, Cloud Services

Country

Japan

Timeline

Feb 2019 - Apr 2019

Challenge

Competitive Japanese eCommerce market

In 2019, Japan is ranked no.4 among the top 10 countries in global retail eCommerce sales. The accelerated growth of the eCommerce market is both a challenge and an opportunity for Japanese retailers. With more retailers & individual sellers starting their online stores, our client realises that current marketing tactics do not perform as well as before. For example, customers will receive dozens of web push notifications every day, and a 20% discount voucher will be less attractive. The market’s competitiveness has pushed the business to find unique ways to maintain its top position. When they came to Rikkeisoft, they wanted to create an in-app online game.

Need a simple yet engaging in-app mobile game

The idea is to use an addictive game to motivate users to open their app every day. They also offer various vouchers & points as the game’s prizes to increase conversion rates. This strategy has been previously used by leading eCommerce companies, such as SheIn or AliExpress. As the game targets the majority of consumers, it needs to be simple enough so that everyone can play but engaging enough so that they feel the urge to play it daily. Plus, a game inside a mobile shopping app is not typical, and from a technical perspective, there are no out-of-the-box solutions. Thus, developing the game requires a team that deeply understands different advanced technologies & how they can work together.

Solution

An online crane machine game

In Japan, arcade centers with colourful crane machines can be found on almost every crowded street, from cities to towns. Luck-based crane game is a vital part of Japan’s modern culture, which Japanese children, adults and the elderly enjoy. After rigorous research about our client’s business & Japan’s consuming market, we thought the crane machine was a perfect game idea for our clients. It’s simple to play while being familiar to the mass majority of Japanese consumers. Moreover, its luck-based rule stimulates people to play to claim prizes, through which we can integrate our client’s vouchers & reward points.

Reward points & more

Then, we built the game from scratch using IoT technology & Amazon Cloud Services. We handled almost everything for this project, from consultancy to operational deployment. In 2 months, we managed to:

Create an online version of a real-life clawing machine game where users can play & get prizes
Create the game inside an eCommerce mobile application
Integrate promotions, earn points & redeem gifts that players can directly use to buy afterward.
Create an effective reward system to incentive customers to play

+ 0 %

new users/month

+ 0 %

active users

Result

By integrating an engaging game into their mobile app, our client successfully increased the amount of time their users open the app by 50% & attracted more new users by 10%.

Moreover, since users redeem more points, gifts & vouchers after playing the game, they are incentivized to purchase more from the app. Indirectly, the game helps boost our clients’ sales, especially revenues from existing customers.