PlayAbly Podcast Episode 27: How Gamification Boosts Conversions: Behind the Psychology

Is your ecommerce store blending into the Shopify sea of sameness? In this episode of The PlayAbly Podcast, we’re joined by PlayAbly CEO and founder John Cheng to uncover the science, psychology, and serious ROI behind ecommerce gamification.

From his early days at Unity to the founding of PlayAbly during the COVID-era ecommerce shakeup, John shares how game mechanics—built on behavioral psychology and user interactivity—can radically increase conversions, customer engagement, and brand recall.

We unpack:

• 🎯 Why gamification taps into core human psychology and drives more meaningful interactions
• 👖 How a “Tinder-style” ecommerce quiz boosted engagement for 65+ shoppers at Jones New York
• 📈 What makes interactive experiences outperform traditional email popups by 30-50%
• 💡 The true difference between gimmicky spinners vs. deeply engaging shoppable games
• 🧠 Why AI is making it easier than ever to personalize gamified touchpoints
• 💰 How brands are using Shopify gamification to reduce CAC and drive retention—without slashing prices

Whether you're thinking about VIP programs, loyalty loops, or just trying to create a better customer journey, this episode offers actionable takeaways on how to authentically connect with your customers—and keep them coming back.

🔗 Want to see what gamification can do for your store? Explore the PlayAbly Game Arcade or learn more about our bespoke builds.

Welcome to the PlayAbly Podcast, where we dive into the art and science of gamification, customer engagement, and driving conversions. 

At PlayAbly, we turn passive audiences into active customers through shoppable games and playable experiences that transform how brands connect with their customers. Book your free demo here.

Thanks for tuning in to the PlayAbly Podcast! Ready to engage your customers like never before? PlayAbly creates branded Shoppable Games that drive results. Don’t forget, mention the podcast during your free demo, and get $500 off (book here). Learn more at playably.ai

Get Your First Month of PlayAbly free when you mention this Podcast during your free PlayAbly Demo - learn how gamification can improve your ecommerce shop at www.playably.ai

Transcript

Playbly Podcast Episode 27: How Gamification Boosts Conversions: Behind the Psychology

Kajal: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the PlayAbly Podcast. . Today we are talking about a topic we get asked about a lot, which is gamification and how it helps with conversions. What is the psychology behind it? How do the gaming mechanics produce more conversions for e-commerce?

joining me is Our CEO and founder John Chang. John, welcome back. 

John: Hey, everybody. Great to be back. 

Kajal: So let's dive right into it, starting with the origin story and the strategic vision so that we can start from there and then go more granular as this episode goes along. What inspired you to bring gaming mechanics to e-commerce?

Was there a light bulb moment that sparked play of Lee's creation? How did it come about? 

John: I think with a lot of more recent startups, it was Covid that drove it as the entire team looked around the landscape and realized some of our favorite businesses weren't gonna make it 

And I didn't wanna [00:01:00] shop at Walmart and eat at only Applebee's the rest of my life. we realized that a lot of what we had been doing at Unity, the game engine company we had all been working at, had built a successful ad business that competed with Facebook and Google using this gamification idea, 

Which is building network that use the ad units that were rewarded, incentivized, gamified, interactive, to grab people's attention in a way that. Resonated across demographics, we're like, wow, we could actually use these same mechanics and approaches more broadly with the brands.

We'd love to help them stand out in a very noisy environment, in a way that would help grow their business much more sustainably. 

Kajal: And coming from Unity and the AI space, you had a lot of experience looking at. Gaming behavior and how that resulted in, more spend more time spent more attention spent.

[00:02:00] What parallels did you see between gaming behavior and e-commerce behavior that made it make sense for you? 

John: one of the things We thought about, 'cause like all of a sudden the game stays for 10 years, but when you come into it, this idea of gamification or games themselves, is not a foreign concept and shouldn't even be a scary concept for D2C operators.

Games are what all people do in different ways, and at the root of games is really just Behavioral economics. Behavioral psychology, this need to have fun to explore curiosity, achievement. That's what games are and that's what human nature is, from that perspective, what we had been developing, at Unity, or even with my first startup, was that.

If you look at how people play, if you look at how they interact, you can tell who somebody is and predict their behavior. that was a core thesis of my first startup and the work we're doing at Unity is how can we look at that interaction and use that [00:03:00] to not only predict what they're gonna do, but serve them better.

And I think that's the root of why gamification is important to e-commerce because the richest data you can collect about a user is when they're interacting. If they're just clicking on a website and it's just one way, you get one view of them. But if you're interacting and you do something and the game does something different, and then you change your behavior and that does something different, that really starts to build a rich profile of who you are as a person and how you're different than other people.

And that is the fundamental power that gamification brings to e-commerce companies because ultimately understanding your customer better and knowing what they want and serving it to them in a way that they want. It is what great brands do historically, intuitively, but we wanna help brands do it with data and do it with games that we provide them.

Kajal: I think it's important [00:04:00] because that is what separates real e-commerce. Gamification from the gimmicks of the spinners, or just the random popup where you don't really interact with it. You just click a button, get a discount, and enter your email. for a lot of brands it can be really difficult.

Getting the data and figuring out what to do with it. I know that's something we really help them with, but can you walk us through a campaign or a brand activation that totally changed the game for the client? what was the measurable impact and what was that data able to do for them?

John: Yeah, one of our favorite examples is a brand that gamification has done an incredible job with. often when you think about games historically, you're like, oh, it's the teenage boy in the basement, playing games on their mom's laptop. But actually for a brand like Jones, New York, which serves women who are 65 and older.

they were really challenged by the fact that these women weren't used to buying [00:05:00] online in the way that other demographics might be. these women would come to the site and see endless products, not know how to navigate, not know how to interact, but even more not know what Jones New York was about, the way we approach a problem like that. is by looking at the audience, who they are, what they're trying to achieve, and how they want to interact. we do a lot of data analysis to understand those patterns we realized these women love interacting graphically, and 

They were able to pick up these mechanics in a very natural and intuitive way. So we introduced what we called a personality quiz. basically crossed with a Tinder mechanic. you could come to Jones and York and say, what is my denim personality? And they're swiping left and swiping right.

And most of them probably never experienced Tinder from a dating perspective, but from a shopping and game experience, they had an incredible time. [00:06:00] instead of thumbing through endless product pages, they were getting to know the product in a 

Very connected way they're seeing, oh, I'm going left, I'm going right. These are the types of jeans I'm most likely interested in. That's a natural way to discover those jeans. they end up spending so much time on the site. Jones New York becomes something they recall two weeks later, which is every marketer's dream, to bring it full circle you have to start with who the customer is, a lot of early gamification, even in related startups, was let's stick a badge on it. a leaderboard. or a spinner. At a very cursory level, it might be, but it's not how humans interact, by understanding the human behind it, you can put in place the mechanics, the structure, the fun that truly resonates. it's important to differentiate, a cursory look at gamification versus a truly psychological implementation in a way that [00:07:00] matters to a brand.

Kajal: So it speaks to them on a buyer's psychology level? Absolutely. It triggers something in them where they want to not only like the brand more, but they also, learn more about the brand. They're able to interact with the products in a way that is fun and not manipulative, I would say. On an emotional level. 

John: In many cases it's not even trying to sell them something. It's rewarding them for their engagement with something fun and something they choose to do. Each of these mechanics and approaches might be different, for different demographics and groups, 

So start with what would authentically delight them, and build on that versus shoving a gimmick in everyone's face and expecting them to love it. that's superficial and takes advantage of, a gimmick.

which isn't sustainable in the long term isn't aligned with what you would want to be your brand values. 

Kajal: And I think the other question that confuses people after they understand how the [00:08:00] games work is where does the game go? Where in the customer journey? Where on the page is the game most effective?

John: What have we seen? the lib answer, can go almost anywhere, but we tend to see it work best closer to the top of the funnel, Games are incredible, at grabbing initial attention. anytime you want to make a first impression, whether that be a landing page, or the homepage, that's a great place for it it's not something they've seen on every single page, Shopify is awesome. It's allowed everyone to be online and to sell. The flip side is everything looks the same now. Every theme is derivations of itself. From perspective of the customer's customer, there's a lot of fatigue.

There's a lot of wow, I've seen this before. Shopify is very transactional. Every Shopify is trying to sell you something immediately and sell it to you hard, and that's just not how people buy many different things, right? So if we can actually build a relationship with [00:09:00] people through interactivity, one real world analogy is that you go into a store and a salesperson says, " Hey, here's 9 99. Buy this. Versus what's your name? Here's a little joke. I see your daughter, she's wearing something cute. All those good things build a rapport, and so the touch points that make sense that we've seen are, those initial touch points, but also more proactively reaching out.

In your email, in your social media posts, and we've most recently pushed it further up into the funnel and paid, which, is our background. Like in ads, we have seen it perform extraordinarily well because instead of selling, you're interacting and that, breaks through a lot of noise, especially on all these different social media networks.

Kajal: And that's the Temu example, right? I believe that's what you touched on for your Shop talk award, which we won, about how, Temu really primes people in the [00:10:00] ad with an interactive, and so by the time they get to the page, they're already more warm than the traditional ad click. 

John: Yeah. And they are.

They're in a mindset where, okay, this might be a place and time that I spend more of my mental energy and that is every brand's dream. and like we talked about at the presentation, Temu was founded by a game developer who understood engagement actually is the key to sales, not just how hard you can sell 

How abrupt you can be with your sale. if you're able to entertain, or engage, you can have those really long relations. we know people who play Team U games and haven't bought from Temu. But that's okay because when they have an item on Temu that they're going to buy, Temu has a huge head start in getting that sale from them.

That's very similar. to our background in free to play mobile games. [00:11:00] 97% of people never buy anything in a free to play mobile game. 98% of people never buy from the e-commerce store. You can still get tremendous value from those people who don't buy. As we learned in games, by building the community, building them as ambassadors, using them for word of mouth, using them to provide the environment that the spenders want to be in.

You spend all this money acquiring these users if they don't buy on day one to drop them immediately. seems like an incredible waste of your marketing effort, for people who might be interested later or who might have friends who are interested or who might be the types of people who do spend and want to be around.

You have to think broader, explicitly in today's environment versus like people show up, they buy or they don't buy, and I don't care otherwise. That's just not how to build a brand in today's environment. 

Kajal: And a lot of brands will try and say that they, they have a, [00:12:00] I think every brand in existence has a popup or email capture on their site, whether it's attached to something like a spinner and a discount or even a one minute quiz.

How do games compare to these traditional list building tactics? 

John: Yeah, very simply, from a metrics perspective, they perform 30 to 50% better, but I think it's more important to understand why. with a popup asking for email. the fatigue is so real that I can't remember the last time I filled one out.

My automatic reaction is to close it because it's clouding blocking what I wanna be doing. The way we present it is. Off to the side. When you're ready, take this little challenge or go through this little adventure and you can earn something. And I think the really interesting outcome on the other side of that is even when compared to the same discount between a pop-up of one of our games, people are two to three times more likely to use the coupon or use the discount or use the [00:13:00] incentive that they earn.

Going back to psychology. When you feel like you've earned it, when you feel like you've gained it through your own effort, it's valuable to you versus some transient popup that popped up when I didn't even know what the brand did, your recall of that activity, that adventure, that experience of that brand provides a lasting value because genuinely.

You're trying to do something to entertain them, give them a little delight in their day. And those are few and far between for most people. build the relationship through that interactivity versus what can I get out of this user as quickly as I can? it's just not the experience anybody wants anymore.

Kajal: So going into the more tangible. If a brand is bought onto the idea of gamification in interviews previously, you said that you used AI to personalize the gaming experience. How does that work in practice? 

John: Yeah, I mean there's, two answers. One, if you're using [00:14:00] Playboy or the other, if you're trying to do it yourself, once again, if you're trying to do it yourself.

gamification. should be a core part of any strategy and number one, it starts with understanding who your audience is as we've discussed. And then number two, understanding where. The sticky points are in terms of your customer experience. having the ability to use data analyze.

Really, the sticking point is when they hit the site, they're not seeing the right experience. when you map that challenge with the audience that you're trying to attract, there's a certain set of mechanics or game styles that are gonna work for that, right? So it could be a puzzle, it could be a quiz, it could be a matcher.

It's important to make sure that is a native experience that fits with what they're looking for. The third thing you gotta do is test, right? The thing we do better than anyone else, is iterate continuously using that data it's not the most complicated system, but it is very intense [00:15:00] and manual something you have to keep alive genuine.

that's why you use services like Playable because that's all we do. we're focused on, making sure your customers have exactly the right mechanic that will not just grab their attention, but delight them.

so if you don't wanna spend 40, 80 hours a week focused on that, then working with a playability makes a ton of sense. 

Kajal: what does that process look like? How does a brand go from, we're curious to We have a live game. 

John: Yeah. when we first started, our idea was we'll build you a game builder and you go off and build, the right game for your audience.

We quickly realized that brand owners are not game developers, nor should they be. they have full-time jobs, So we developed a white glove service where you just sit with our game developers and brand strategists to think about your objectives?

Who do you think your customers are? And then we go and do the data work. [00:16:00] At no charge to you, we come back with the storyboard and wireframes of two or three places where we think we can make a 30 or 50% increase in performance with one of the games that we built.

So the step really is, let's talk about your customer base. Let's talk about what you're trying to achieve. Let's talk about where we're falling down, and then let's show you. Here's what it will look like on your land, on your homepage. Here's the different steps the customer will go through. We find agreement on that.

Within a week. We have it built out. We then test it, right? what we're really excited about is as soon as that step happens, most of our customers, are like, can we do this? I have this idea for a game that we could put here.

the wheels start to turn once. you see what's possible, and how your customers react to something fun and different. then the snowball starts rolling, I think the easiest answer is we build something small for you.

We build something straightforward, to get the ball rolling, and [00:17:00] from there anything is possible, right? we're building full standalone mobile games for big banks and other clients. And then we're building small. Easy to use popups on homepages, it all depends on what your brand is trying to do, who your customers are, what your current problems are, and how we can generate as much ROI as quickly, as possible.

Kajal: And the results usually come in pretty quickly, right? Yeah. normally once we launch, we get. A good amount of data From day one. 

John: Like it's not something your users are going to miss when they see that thing on the side. Hey, what is this? I think the metric we're most proud about is the 90 to 95% completion rate of someone opening it up and looking at it, That means not only did it grab their attention, but once they got into the experience, it fit what they were looking for. They saw the need through gamification and psychology to complete [00:18:00] it. So automatically they have spent three times as long as they would've on your site.

They have learned about what your site is about, what your brand is about. they're in a position like we talked about, that they would be more likely to buy even if the discount was the same. one other point we'd love to make is.

gamification doesn't need to be driven by discounts. It doesn't need to be about providing a coupon. Gamification can be about providing rewards for just engaging. It could be providing a fun experience. It could be like with Jones, New York, just telling you what personality you have in Jeans, 

That's why Cosmo quizzes did so well. and Wordle does so well for New York Times, we can bring that to your brand. in A way that builds authentic engagement with an audience that keeps coming back. And when the time is right, there's a transaction to be had, but you don't need to rush it because you're trusting that they're gonna be coming back on their own volition.

Kajal: And you spent a lot of time this [00:19:00] year at conferences. We've seen I think just 10x the number of articles about gamification, in e-commerce What is it about right now that makes gamification so popular to talk about? Why is it the right time for gamification right now? 

John: Yeah, there's two answers to this. I'll try and be as succinct as possible. I think one is ai. AI has enabled us to bring down the cost of producing these highly custom native games by at least 10x, right?

So things that cost. big brands, hundreds of thousands of dollars to do, we can do at a 10th or 20th of that cost. And I think that democratizes that capability to a wide range of people that didn't have access to it before. So that's point number one. Point number two is.

everyone is aware, the economy isn't what it was, right? the [00:20:00] volatility the uncertainty has led to tightening wallets and costs that need to be rationalized. gamification. Is incredibly important because instead of relying on paid marketing, you're relying on the psychology of humans, which.

can be free or much less cost, a big driver of gamification is gonna be cost savings. I can spend less on paid marketing, retargeting. email programs. and prospecting. If I have a game that brings people back organically.

Number two, encourages them to share my brand with other people. Does all the work that I need to have done for me in a way that. Frankly, it's just much cheaper and more effective more authentic and more aligned with my brand. So it's a win across dimensions in this environment where people are looking to cut costs, it becomes a way to still. Connect with your customers the way you want to [00:21:00] without having to spend on Facebook that you have no idea will ever come back 

Kajal: your way to saving. 

Folks, if you have other questions on your mind, feel free to submit them and we're more than happy to talk about them.

Would love for this episode the Play of Podcast and we'll catch you next time. 

John: Sounds good. Thanks