Milton Keynes, UK, 2014-11-17— /EPR Retail News/ — Leading digital retailer Argos has this week officially launched its 2014 Christmas Gift Finder – the world’s first swipe-to-like shopping web app, which has already been nominated for an industry award.¹
The Gift Finder was developed by Convert, a new London-based digital agency set up by the award-winning Cheltenham-based agency Nerv to specialise in innovation for retail and fashion brands. During development, Convert took a mobile-first approach, allowing all interactions to be achieved one handed and on the move, using any smart phone, tablet or desktop browser.
The app uses the proven swipe-to-like interaction which has reinvented online dating to suggest gifts to customers. Each like and dislike contributes to and improves an intelligent collaborative filtering system. Simply, this means each customer who uses the Gift Finder makes it smarter, which is behind the strategy of soft-launching the app.
During its initial soft-launch stage, the Gift Finder saw viral growth of over 300,000 visits, with three quarters of those 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.
Mark Steel, Head of Digital Trading, Marketing & Operations at Argos said: “With almost a quarter² 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.”
James Dye, co-founder of Convert 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 smart social 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 click 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.
The Argos Gift Finder and ‘Friend or Fraud’ Facebook game can be found at www.argos.co.uk/giftfinder.
-ENDS-
¹The Argos Gift Finder has been nominated forRetail Week’s‘Customer Innovation of the Year’ award.
²Sales via mobile devices now represent 22 per cent of total Argos sales. Source: Home Retail Group HY results, 22 October 2014.
Notes to Editors:
For more information, please contact the Argos Press Office on 0845 120 4365 or email: media.relations@argos.co.uk.
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About Argos
Argos is a leading UK digital retailer, offering around 43,000 products through www.argos.co.uk, its growing mobile channels, stores and over the telephone.
Argos continues to be the UK’s largest high street retailer online with around 123m customer transactions a year through its stores and 738 million website and app visits in the 12 months to February 2014. Customers can take advantage of Argos’ convenient Check & Reserve service available through its network of 734 stores across the UK and Republic of Ireland.
In the financial year to February 2014, Argos sales were £4.1 billion and it employed some 29,000 people across the business.
Argos is part of Home Retail Group, the UK’s leading home and general merchandise retailer.
About Convert
Convert is an independently owned digital agency working at the nexus of behavioural economics, marketing, code and user experience. We deliver digitally innovative campaigns for retail businesses that focus on growth, data and conversion. Convert is part of the Nerv group, a UK-based agency working with key retail clients like Argos, Topshop, Reiss, Ted Baker, Paddy Power and Superdry. To find out more, visit www.convert.social.
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