Ron Halversen and Chris Reddick discuss gamification and how it can be used to alter user behavior on a marketplace eCommerce platform.

Part 6 of an 8-part series (Return to Part 5)

RON: There was one thing that you mentioned, gamification, and you were talking about behavior and membership organization software. And how do you—I think you used the word entice—them to upgrade. And how do you help increase the engagement level of buyers and sellers? 
 
It doesn't always have to be about money on your eCommerce marketplace. You could do things like, ”Hey, if you get at least 100 reviews, you earn a badge as a seller.” “If you sell at least 10,000 items or close 10,000 transactions, you earn Power Seller status." Gamification is a huge incentive, right? It's just as big as reviews. 
 
We just bought a brand new bed and a rug for our master bedroom. And it was amazing to me. I'm just like, “Look, it's couple hundred bucks. Who cares?” And my wife's like, “No, you have to go read reviews. That one has better reviews of that.” She spent like three hours reading reviews over a $300 bed frame. I’m like, “Who really cares?” But she does, right?  

She does not make a decision, does not make a purchase on B2C marketplaces unless she goes through every single digital storefront review and reads them and she goes straight to the negative reviews and she's like, “Oh, that's dumb. It's about shipping.” It has nothing to do about the product, right? She's very intelligent about the way she reads the reviews and uses the reviews, and she looks for customer-uploaded pictures and how it looks in their bedrooms. She really makes the mobile online experience as close to brick and mortar so that it’s like she has actually seen it and trusts it when she hits that button to buy. Those are the types of things you have to think about, because you have a lot of buyers that are like that.  

So how do you bring that experience close to them? How do you make them trust the sellers that you have on your marketplace platform? And if you're not allowing reviews and uploaded pictures and gamification and badge and Power Seller and all that status, and if you don't have the governance that protects them, you could drastically negatively impact the system. But also, if you do have those things, you could drastically impact the positive engagement of not only the buyers but the sellers as well, because they want to earn that next badge. They want to earn that next level because there's some additional benefit 

 

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RON: Maybe, for a day or a week, they get to pick one of their products, [and it] becomes featured on the home page. When they hit 10,000 views—it's not going to cost you anything—but for them, it might change their entire business. And so they might go crazy to hit that 10,000-transaction mark just so they can get that one featured product on your marketplace homepage. So think about the types of things that you can increase engagement. Did you want to touch anything on that before we go to the next one, Chris? 
 
CHRIS: I just want to reiterate that, and just add another angle to it by saying that one of the things is really interesting. You know, a lot of gamification, with a lot of folks, it feels gimmicky with a lot of the ways that it was done in the past. And I think a lot of what you see nowadays is a lot of maturity around that, where it really is focused around mechanical things that help people do what they should be doing anyway. 
 
As sellers, if you think about it, sellers are looking for volume. They want reliable volume and reasonable customers. And so they're typically going to be looking at your marketplace software as an opportunity to expand their advertising reach and their ability to scale up their volume. And it really needs to be reliable. Ultimately you can have this reciprocal relationship where you like benefit the sellers who benefit the buyers the most. And this is consistently reinforced behaviorally within your marketplace, whether it's a B2B, C2C, or B2C marketplace.  

Just like you said, Ron, if you just get into the brass tacks of the mechanics for the sellers, they will absolutely comply with this upward spiral of your marketplace. As you get more traffic and you reward that set of sellers that are behaving optimally within the online marketplace, that will cause more buyers to reliably come and persist in the marketplace because they know they can trust those sellers. That will create more traffic. And this will tend toward having more sellers flocking to the system. And then if you reward them appropriately, then more buyers will trust it. It ends up becoming an upward spiral.  

This is the crux in the foundation of what creates that upward spiral after you create your marketplace. There are other aspects that are really key, too, but if you boil it down, it's that trust and credibility. The foundation that you want to be thinking about and asking is like a litmus question, to be asking at all times, “How is this eCommerce software? How is this system? And how is the design of it going to naturally encourage this upward spiral within my B2C marketplace platform, and this self-service and automation toward this upward spiral to occur within my marketplace? 
 
RON: Yeah. Thanks for that. So I love the upward spiral. It's true, right? It builds momentum and it just swirls into the cyclone of activities around the whole thing. Everything affects everything else. And that's what we've seen year after year with our clients.  

Continue to Part 7 to find out more about marketplace reporting.