This week, digital retailer Argos launched its 2014 Christmas Gift Finder, the world‘s first swipe-to-like shopping app, based on the mobile matchmaker Tinder.
The Gift Finder uses a swipe-to-like interaction to suggest gifts to customers. Its model works in a similar fashion to online dating and is the first app of its kind.
Behind the development of the Gift Finder is Convert, a new London-based digital agency set up by award-winning agency Nerv, to specialise in innovation for retail and fashion brands.
Each ‘like‘ and ‘dislike‘ that comes from swiping contributes to, and improves, an intelligent collaborative filtering system. Simply put, each customer who uses the app makes it smarter. This is behind the strategy of its soft launch and saw a viral growth of over 300,000 visits, a quarter of which came from mobile devices. The average visitor spent over three minutes looking at gift suggestions and swiping through over 60 of the some 6,000 available gifts per visit.
Mark Steel, Head of Digital Trading, Marketing and Operations at Argos 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.”
Co-founder of Convert, James Dye added:
“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 enhanced gift inspiration this year with the smart social Facebook game ‘Friend or Fraud‘. Users log in with their profiles to build personal wish lists and inviting friends to test how well they know them by guessing their selection through swipe interactions.
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 is 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.
The game has an additional set of quirky features including ‘Share or Shop‘ which allows customers to give gift inspiration by emailing a particular product to a friend or clicking directly through to the Argos website to make a purchase. In addition, the ‘Manage Your Game‘ feature enables people to swipe left or right through further product suggestions to make it harder for friends to guess correctly.
