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1. Introduction
Gamification is “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts” (Deterding et al., 2011) to make a product, service or application more fun, engaging and motivating. Gamification is being implemented in different business areas: for example, in commerce and marketing to achieve greater customer engagement and loyalty and to increase sales (Hamari, 2017); in other sectors such as education to promote behavioral changes (Christy and Fox, 2014); or even in banking to increase socialness without having to afford the high cost of traditional face to face relationship (Rodrigues et al., 2016). Spain, together with the US, is the country with the most gamification projects per capita in the world according to the organizers of Gamification World Congress 2015 (Marca España, 2015).
It has been proven that although the increasing interest in gamification, reflected in the academic context (Hamari et al., 2014), begins to be transferred to the field of e-commerce (Aydin, 2015; Bilgihan et al., 2016), the number of scientific publications in this area is still small. Although the motivational effect of rewards on gamified environments has been shown in sectors such as education, working environment and marketing, however, there is still an absence of a coherent and ample body of empirical evidence that would confirm such effect (Hamari, 2017), especially in the case of e-commerce.
Gamification tools can be used on e-commerce Web pages for different purposes, such as content generation, increasing conversion and promoting user loyalty (Bilgihan et al., 2016). Large companies such as Amazon or eBay are taking advantage of the positive aspects that are contributed by game elements, using them on their Web pages to encourage the activity of their users. Precisely one of the purposes of this work is to analyze the influence of gamification on the users of the e-commerce platform www.amazon.es. This platform uses a reputation points system (RPS) that includes points, badges and leaderboards (PBL) as elements of gamification, which reflect the results of users’ actions in their “online reputation.”
Business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce continues to increase annually in Spain. At present in Spain, 21.4 per cent of the population belongs to the millennial generation (born between 1982 and 2003) (INE, 2017). They are the segment that purchases the most...