Gamification in E-Commerce—Conversion Rates and Shopping Cart Abandonments

The e-commerce sector offers unprecedented growth opportunities and reshapes traditional business models, which are enhanced by the increasing integration of gamification elements. This development emphasizes the urgency of comprehensively analyzing this topic and generating first insights into potential drivers of conversion rates and shopping cart abandonments. Although gamification is already widely used in practice, there is a lack of comparative scientific research. A mixed-methods approach is utilized, combining qualitative expert interviews (five experts from heterogeneous backgrounds) and discrete choice experiments with consumers (102 participants and five choices each across both experiments). A relative ranking of common gamification elements is empirically established both in the context of increasing conversion rates and reducing shopping cart abandonments. Both contexts lead to inherently different rankings, implying differences in the underlying mechanics. Furthermore, the results imply that gamification in the context of shopping cart abandonments is a much more complex situation than its deployment in other parts of the e-commerce platform. While games of chance, except scratch cards, are perceived negatively across both contexts, when it comes to shopping cart abandonments, passive elements, such as progress bars and timers, are distinctly preferred over active elements, such as mini games. The findings hint at the need for careful selection and adaptation of gamification strategies in accordance with the objectives of consumers during the different phases of the customer journey.