How to Grow Ecommerce Sales with OpenCart Games Module

People love playing games. During the halloween we created a game on our website where you had to shoot falling pumpkins. Every pumpkin that you show gave you 1% of a discount. Depending on your number of pumpkins shot the system was awarding you with a discount code that you could use to purchase iSenseLabs products. Did this work? You bet! Not only we increased sales, but we also increase the time spent on our website and the overall bounce rate (with this page in specific it was less than 10%. As we though that the results were just great, we decided to share our win and make it available to anyone who wants to benefit from our inherent need to play, have fun and stay engaged. When you also throw in a prize, things get only better. This blogpost will be leading you through the functions of the game and will show you how to config the games module. You can also view the demo here: http://games.demo.isenselabs.com/.

What does it do?

The Games module allows you to add HTML5 based games to your OpenCart store. Currently there are 2 games, which you can choose from, with more to come. You can also easily customise the games to your likings. The games are separate entities and their files reside in the games/ directory in the root of your OpenCart installation. New games can be added by just dropping them in this directory. The OpenCart extension acts as a bridge which allows the games to connect to OpenCart. It also gives you a nice and easy way to manage, run and customise the games. Let me walk you through the process of creating and customising one of the existing games.

Basic config

In your OpenCart admin panel go to Extensions > Modules > Games. Click the "Add game" button. You will see something like this: 

As you can see, there are three main areas on the page:

  1. The general settings area is going to be the same at all times. This is where you name your game and set its status.
  2. The games listing area is where all of the installed games are listed. If you add/remove games from the games/ directory this section will be updated.
  3. The game specific settings area - Each game comes with its own set of specific settings. The Easter and the Halloween games are discount oriented, so they provide fields for configuring the maximum discount amount which can be won by the players and the validity duration of the generated discount codes. Future games or games you install additionally can provide a different set of configuration field, depending on their purpose. For example a game which will give reward points, may have fields for setting up the maximum reward points or a game which has some sort of Facebook sharing abilities may provide fields for configuring a Facebook app.

After you are done setting up your game, it will be listed in the extension's main screen. A unique URL is generated for the game, which you must use to open the game. You can set this link somewhere in your site, ads or share it in the social networks.

Advanced config

You can further customize the look of each game to make it suit your site/event better. To do so, click the Customize button in the admin panel area:

This will lead you to a new page, where you will have a config panel on the left side of the screen and the game on the right. You should be seeing something similar to this: 

Each game can provide different set of configuration options. Changes here are applied immediately and you can see how the changes are affecting the game as you do them. Feel free to click around and try different options. Use the Save settings button when you are happy with the configuration. This will save the settings, so people playing the game will load the custom configuration. 

Adding custom images

Each game comes with its own set of images which you can change easily. Lets take the halloween game for example. Take a look at its directory (games/halloween/). You will see an assets/ directory in it, there is an img/ directory. This is where the images are located. If you want to change the flavor of a game, just upload your custom images in that directory and they will appear as options in the game customizer page.

To wrap it up

The games module gives you the unique ability to add games to OpenCart store and we will continue to develop it. The way it is build allows other developers to create games for it, so it is likely that variety of games will be available in the future. Access the Games module for OpenCart on: https://isenselabs.com/products/view/games-engage-customers-with-your-store-branded-game

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