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Is there anyone who never played anything in their childhood? Hide and seek, tag, musical chair, pen - paper – scissors, so on, to name a few. Do you think playing remains only for childhood days? Cricket, football, field hockey, etc., to name a few. Playing games have always been a cross-generational activity that piqued interest and fun (Huotari & Hamari, 2017). More than a billion people play games on mobile globally (Joensuu & Ryynänen, 2019). No doubt that the game makes the play more fun and entertaining (Heeter et al., 2011). And many are part of serious games knowingly or unknowingly, which can be considered as something beyond fun and entertainment. Like the concept of serious games, gamification uses game elements but as part of an entertainment game for purposes other than their regular expected use (Buckley et al., 2019). Gamification has been more specifically well-defined as “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts” (Deterding, 2012). Gamification in this context can be defined by employing or embedding the features of game elements like virtual currency, leader boards, points, etc., as a set of any specific behavior and processes applied for getting better engagement of its consumers (Bozkurt & Durak, 2018). Gamification is an efficient design strategy that is still developing in recent years for driving game mechanics into existing real-life contexts, especially in e-commerce (Rapp et al., 2019). The interest in gamification in academics and e-commerce is increasing, and it has already been proven. Still, the absence of enough empirical evidence on individual game elements, especially in online commerce(García-Jurado et al., 2019), is something important that needs to be studied. India, being one among the internationally recognized, quick developing, and most significant emerging e-commerce industries that expect to cross 200 billion US dollars by 2026 from 38.5 billion US dollars as of 2017 (E-Commerce in India| IBEF, 2021).
Flipkart, along with other minor specialist e-commerce platforms, is presently among the most dominant e-tailers in the Indian e-commerce industry (Prashar et al., 2015; Rajan, 2020). Flipkart Plus is a no-cost successful loyalty initiative for all of its regular customers (Trauboth, 2020). Buyers must earn five hundred SuperCoins to be eligible for this program. Flipkart Plus members earn four SuperCoins per each one hundred rupees invested on a Flipkart purchase, while non-plus customers receive two SuperCoins (Gayathry, 2019). Flipkart SuperCoins is one of the limited virtual currencies used for e-tailing (Moin & Rahman, 2019). The virtual currency reward system that has got some exchange value within the system can be considered virtual currency in the gamification framework (Dicheva et al., 2021). Therefore the virtual currency has got an attribute of private currency that is mainly used in online transactions by using various technological factors. In the case of Flipkart SuperCoins, it can be used for payment for the products, buying coupons, buy exclusive deals and book flight tickets by using the same platform (Flipkart, 2019). The fact of the matter is that virtual currency is slowly replacing real physical currency in the e-commerce context, but nobody is having enough statistical proof on the exact replacement. If we consider the Indian population, there is a tremendous amount of interest invested in virtual currencies (Mohammad Usman, 2020). According to the recent statistics, India being appraised to contribute around ten percent of the overall virtual currency market worldwide. Even though more than one thousand five hundred types of virtual currencies are seen in India (Sackheim & Howell, 2018), we could hardly find the virtual currency in an e-commerce platform. This scenario constantly questions how far the virtual currency is affecting real-life scenarios (Wang & Mainwaring, 2008). This question remains in the mind of both academicians and business people. Therefore this investigation focuses on virtual currency in a gamified e-commerce context. The gamified virtual currency considered for this empirical study is SuperCoins which are stored and transacted only through the Flipkart domain's designated mobile application or website.