Housewares Business-to-business magazine for housewares retailers and their suppliers
Argos has officially launched its 2014 Christmas Gift Finder, which it describes as the world’s first swipe-to-like shopping web app.
The app uses a swipe-to-like interaction (that works in a similar fashion to online dating) to suggest gifts to customers. Each ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ the comes from swiping contributes to, and improves, an intelligent collaborative filtering system. Simply put, this means that each customer who uses the Gift Finder makes it smarter.
During its app’s initial soft-launch stage, the Gift Finder saw viral growth of over 300,000 visits – of which 75% came from mobile devices. The average visitor spent over three minutes looking at gift suggestions and swiping through over 60 of the 6000 available gifts per visit.
Argos head of digital trading, marketing & operations Mark Steel said: “With almost a quarter of our total sales now coming from mobile devices, we know shoppers are increasingly purchasing products on-the-go.
We’ve developed a rewarding mobile experience that is visually rich, thumb-friendly and intuitive, to make Argos stand out from the crowd in the mobile battleground this year.”
Behind the development of the Gift Finder is Convert, a new London-based digital agency set up by agency Nerv, to specialise in innovation for retail and fashion brands. Convert co-founder James Dye said: “Within the Argos Gift Finder the customer only discovers relevant, intelligently recommended products, one at a time, which makes for quick and easy decisions. It lets the customer drill down to a “maybe list” very quickly; then save, email the list, or go straight on to purchase the items.”
Argos has also added a different twist to gift inspiration this year with the Facebook game ‘Friend or Fraud’, where users log in with their profile to build their own wish list and invite their friends to test how well they know them by guessing their selection by swiping left or right.
Just like the Argos Gift Finder, the game was designed by Convert, and uses an optional filtering system so that each user’s profile information, friend list, email address and birthday are used to recommend relevant, accurate products when building wish lists. On opening the game, users swipe through 20 items they ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ to set up their profile before inviting their friends to play. From here, users can invite their friends to play, and a leader board is created ranking how well each friend has done when guessing the wish list.
The game has an additional set of quirky features such as ‘Share or Shop’ which allows users to give gift inspiration by emailing a particular product to a friend or clicking directly through to argos.co.uk to make a purchase, while the ‘Manage Your Game’ feature enables people to swipe left or right through more product suggestions to make it harder for friends to guess correctly.
