After few friendly fights around the word Gamification we decided to explore it further as a direction for upcoming years. Zero downing on ideas like group buying, daily check-ins and quiz games in our lunch meetings, we decided to start the ball rolling with the CTP(Cut the Price) as our first experiment.
The goal of this article is to show you how we planned, design and developed, and launched our first mini eCommerce game “Cut the Price”.
Why Gamification?
To build a new world of fun and games for our consumers, increase new signups, engage users, and grow business exponentially.
What is CTP?
A game where you need to invite your friends and family, to help you win a free product from LimeRoad app.
Why start with CTP?
Low effort, High impact.
With CTP we pictured low effort in building the bare-minimum concept compare to the other ideas we have in our documents, and the high impact considering the insights we’ve about consumers in Indian space.
Game challenges & rewards
Challenges
- Select a product from Free products listing page and make your first cut.
- Share with your friends and family for more cuts.
- Each time a friend volunteers to help you cut, you will get 4–5% cut on product value.
- Rush through the cutting in 24 hours or miss the opportunity.
Rewards
Once you managed to cut down the price of product to zero we will ship the product for Free.
Our approach
We kicked off the CTP in August 2018, aiming for baseline requirements for our first release, and an extremely tight scope on user challenges and rewards.
By the first week of September 2018, we were ready for the launch on our Mobile-Site. After few in-house user testing sessions we exposed it to 5% of our Mobile-Site users to validate the UX and record the early reactions.
On first day of Mobile-Site launch, we received around 2,48,360 new signups by exposing it to just 5% of our M-Site users. And also, a heck lot of videos and articles published all over India. Crazy, eh?
Seeing the crazy response we decided to pause the experiment on same day (after around 11 hours of exposure), and decided to get it ready for our Android app users too before we make it live again.
Again, after few weeks of focused work on Android app, and drastic improvements in our designs and algorithms, and few in-house testing sessions we started exposing it on our platforms. By mid of October CTP was live for 50% of our consumers.
And, our consumers loved it, our first mini e-commerce game!
Key areas we focused on
- Strict timeframe, to help us quickly figure out if we’re onto a good idea or not. The only way to figure that out is by shipping it to our users and seeing what feedback we got. We managed to ship the bare minimum and viable of the game in just 3 weeks of time for our M-Site users.
- No-brainer UX, we tried to keep the whole thing as simple as possible.
- Ship bare minimum (but Top-Notch), it was very important for us to stick to bare minimum to validate the idea fast but overall nicely done.
- User testing, ask for feedback as early on as possible. So we keep improving what we’re trying to build.
Response
Daily new signups rate increased from approx. 50k everyday to 3,00,000 everyday. We achieved highest rank of the app in India in all categories.
The app was no.1 in trending apps for approx. 2 weeks. The above stats also effected the repeat customers data significantly for us!
