CHINA. Digital services provider Jessica’s Secret has launched a new ‘price grading’ feature for its popular duty free shopping app. The feature compares and ‘scores’ pricing across multiple stores.
Previously, users of the Jessica’s Secret app could only learn about a retailer’s pricing by viewing the pages of the respective shops’ ecommerce sites. The new function offers users a much more efficient path, the company said.
A unique grading system helps customers to establish which retailer offers the best deal by giving each price a score after all the prices are converted into Chinese RMB. This is a much more consumer-friendly approach for Chinese users, Jessica’s Secret noted.
How the system works
Only products that are sold in over three duty free stores worldwide will be scored by the grading system. With just one click on the Price Grading button, products sold in the shops will be listed and ranked by their scores.
The mechanism will calculate the highest price, the lowest price and the range of all prices of every product from the Jessica’s Secret database. It then calculates the ‘scores’ those prices will get, based on a 0 to 10 system.
A 10-point price represents best value; a 0.1 score (the lowest possible) equates to a product being the most expensive at a particular store.
To make it easy for users, a colour code is applied to the price-grading system. Four distinct colours represent four different ranges of scores. Red, orange, green and blue indicate 0-2.9; 3-5.9; 6-8.9; and 9-10 respectively.
Users can discover the price ranking by opening the relevant product detail page and checking the price scale under the product’s picture.
The Jessica’s Secret App is currently adding a shortcut icon for this new feature. Users will be able to click directly to the list page via the icon and find the scored products.
Jessica’s Secret told The Moodie Davitt Report today that user numbers have been growing rapidly. To date, there have been over 1.8 million downloads, while the app attracts 230,000 monthly active users.
“Travel retail product pricing can be traced and recorded for years, while user behaviour and demographics on the App are valuable references,” the company said. “The new developed feature means that Jessica’s Secret has gradually transformed from being a data collector into a data analyst.”
