‘Gamifying’ the online shopping experience

Letstango.com extends the analogy to a shopping scenario, seeking to achieve a ‘different’ relationship between retailer and consumer in the online space, full of grace and harmony.

It’s about being with customers every step of the way, giving them a fun shopping experience to remember, says Dikran Tchablakian, founder of LetsTango.com’s UAE-based parent company CompuMe, which was recently rebranded to Tecbuy to expand its store-in-store concept and strengthen its presence in the Middle East.

Tchablakian underlines the remarkable changes in people’s lifestyles in the 15 years his company has been active in the retail space in the UAE and Middle East. “Rapid demographic and technological changes have impacted the way we do business, communicate and consume information,” he says, pointing out that digital buyers in the MEA region are growing at a CAGR of 49%, their number expected to touch 73 million in 2016 from the present 50 million.

Letstango, launched in mid-2013, offers best-priced deals on branded products like mobile phones, electronics, tablets, cameras, printers, gadgets, computer peripherals and more that comply to the country’s DED Consumer Protection Act.

But it isn’t a multichannel expansion of the Tecbuy Electronics chain of standalone and shop-in-shop electronics stores in the GCC. The disconnect between Tecbuy’s brick-and-mortar set-up and the ecommerce brand isn’t accidental, however, claims Vishnu Vardhan, director of Letstango. Rather, it’s a business strategy to offer entirely different shopping experiences online and offline.

“Letstango doesn’t function as an extension of Tecbuy. It’s an independent entity. We wanted our customers to discover a new shopping experience unavailable in the Middle East ecommerce industry so we looked at our online business from a fresh perspective,” says Vardhan.