Bidr
A live auction application that lets you win great products while having fun.
Where did this idea come from?
In our 5th year at Hetic, we devoted most of our year to developing a business project. With my group, composed of 6 complementary profiles, we decided to develop an application that modernizes the concept of home shopping. Today, ads on the Internet are less and less viewed. Whether they are on YouTube, Tik Tok, Instagram or others: they are very easy to avoid and appear more and more as an obstacle to the user experience. Advertisers are therefore looking for new ways to capture the attention of their potential customers. At the same time, users have never spent so much time looking for the cheapest products online. They go through online classified advertisement, scan for bargains, and assiduously follow private sales thinking they are saving time and money. So on one hand, we have advertisers seeking to better captivate their audience, and on the other hand, consumers looking for the cheapest products. We have decided to respond to this double observation.
Bringing together advertisers and their audience by putting advertising at the center of a unique and innovative shopping experience.
What's Bidr?
Bidr is an application that offers weekly micro-auctions with products at reduced prices. It is aimed at the general public by its fun and gamified aspect but also at advertisers by answering their problems: the promotion of their product.
The functioning of the application is simple, each week, a different brand is highlighted on the application in the form of a live event where one of the brand's flagship products will be auctioned. During the live, a host is present to guide the users and animate the auction. A custom-made advertisement for the partner brand is broadcast at the beginning of the live.
The auction can then finally begin. With each click to bid, the price of the final product will increase by one cent. And to do this, the user will have to spend virtual currency, acquired beforehand. The winner has the chance to leave with an exceptional product at a very low price. He or she will only have to pay the final price at which he or she won the product and have it delivered. For the others, the appointment is made for the following week.
What is the strength of this application?
The strength of the product lies in the fact that the audience is focused on the advertisers' message since it is the product they are trying to win. Moreover, this advertising experience is not felt as such and lasts more than 10 minutes. Bidr's user base is also qualified thanks to onboarding. As soon as they arrives on the application, they are invited to provide certain information such as their age and the types of products they prefer. This will allow us to warn them when one of their brands is in the spotlight or if one of the products they like is available in the auction. It is also a way to collect data on our users and thus attract advertisers by promising them an audience that is already receptive.
Product constraints related to direct
The interface of the live part was particularly complex to design because in addition to the video stream, we had a lot of information to place: the comment space, the player's pot, the general ranking, the current bet, the bid button and the information on the product involved. It was a great UX job, and an opportunity to do some small-scale A/B testing.
What is the outcome of this project?
This entrepreneurial project has been a great exercise in concretization. During this project, the creation of a complete business plan allowed me to expand my knowledge on a multitude of axes: market segmentation, competitive positioning, customer acquisition process, monetization, and so on, and globally to sharpen my strategic vision of a product.