Consumer spending accounts for a large fraction of the US economic activity. Increasingly, consumer activity is moving to the web, where digital traces of shopping and purchases provide valuable data about consumer behavior. We analyze these data extracted from emails and combine them with demographic information to characterize, model, and predict consumer behavior. Breaking down purchasing by age and gender, we find that the amount of money spent on online purchases grows sharply with age, peaking in late 30s. Men are more frequent online purchasers and spend more money when compared to women. Linking online shopping to income, we find that shoppers from more affluent areas purchase more expensive items and buy them more frequently, resulting in significantly more money spent on online purchases. We also look at dynamics of purchasing behavior and observe daily and weekly cycles in purchasing behavior, similarly to other online activities. More specifically, we observe temporal patterns in purchasing behavior suggesting shoppers have finite budgets: the more expensive an item, the longer the shopper waits since the last purchase to buy it. We also observe that shoppers who email each other purchase more similar items than socially unconnected shoppers, and this effect is particularly evident among women. Finally, we build a model to predict when shoppers will make a purchase and how much will spend on it. We find that temporal features improve prediction accuracy over competitive baselines. A better understanding of consumer behavior can help improve marketing efforts and make online shopping more pleasant and efficient.
in offline stores have been extensively investigated as they have direct consequences on the revenue potential of retailers and advertisers. Survey-based studies attempted to isolate the factors that lead a customer to buy an item or, in other words, to understand what the strongest predictors of a purchase are. Although the mere amount of online activity of a customer can predict to some extent the occurrence of a future purchase @cite_1 , multifaceted predictive models have been proposed in the past. Features related to the phase of information gathering (access to search features, prior trust of the website) and to the purchase potential (monetary resources, product value) can often predict whether a given item will be purchased or not @cite_0 @cite_16 .
@cite_0 @cite_16 @cite_1
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Abstract The authors develop and estimate a model of online buying using clickstream data from a Web site that sells cars. The model predicts online buying by linking the purchase decision to what visitors do and to what they are exposed to while at the site. To overcome the challenges of predicting Internet buying, the authors decompose the purchase process into the completion of sequential nominal user tasks and account for heterogeneity across visitors at the county level. Using a sequence of binary probits, the authors model the visitor’s decision of whether to complete each task for the first time, given that the visitor has completed the previous tasks at least once. The results indicate that visitors’ browsing experiences and navigational behavior predict task completion for all decision levels. The results also indicate that the number of repeat visits per se is not diagnostic of buying propensity and that a site’s offering of sophisticated decision aids does not guarantee increased conversion rat... This empirical study investigates the contribution of different types of predictors to the purchasing behaviour at an online store. We use logit modelling to predict whether or not a purchase is made during the next visit to the website using both forward and backward variable-selection techniques, as well as Furnival and Wilson’s global score search algorithm to find the best subset of predictors. We contribute to the literature by using variables from four different categories in predicting online-purchasing behaviour: (1) general clickstream behaviour at the level of the visit, (2) more detailed clickstream information, (3) customer demographics, and (4) historical purchase behaviour. The results show that predictors from all four categories are retained in the final (best subset) solution indicating that clickstream behaviour is important when determining the tendency to buy. We clearly indicate the contribution in predictive power of variables that were never used before in online purchasing studies. Detailed clickstream variables are the most important ones in classifying customers according to their online purchase behaviour. In doing so, we are able to highlight the advantage of e-commerce retailers of being able to capture an elaborate list of customer information. Recommender problems with large and dynamic item pools are ubiquitous in web applications like content optimization, online advertising and web search. Despite the availability of rich item meta-data, excess heterogeneity at the item level often requires inclusion of item-specific "factors" (or weights) in the model. However, since estimating item factors is computationally intensive, it poses a challenge for time-sensitive recommender problems where it is important to rapidly learn factors for new items (e.g., news articles, event updates, tweets) in an online fashion. In this paper, we propose a novel method called FOBFM (Fast Online Bilinear Factor Model) to learn item-specific factors quickly through online regression. The online regression for each item can be performed independently and hence the procedure is fast, scalable and easily parallelizable. However, the convergence of these independent regressions can be slow due to high dimensionality. The central idea of our approach is to use a large amount of historical data to initialize the online models based on offline features and learn linear projections that can effectively reduce the dimensionality. We estimate the rank of our linear projections by taking recourse to online model selection based on optimizing predictive likelihood. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method significantly and uniformly outperforms other competitive methods and obtains relative lifts that are in the range of 10-15 in terms of predictive log-likelihood, 200-300 for a rank correlation metric on a proprietary My Yahoo! dataset; it obtains 9 reduction in root mean squared error over the previously best method on a benchmark MovieLens dataset using a time-based train test data split. The frequently changing user preferences and or item profiles have put essential importance on the dynamic modeling of users and items in personalized recommender systems. However, due to the insufficiency of per user item records when splitting the already sparse data across time dimension, previous methods have to restrict the drifting purchasing patterns to pre-assumed distributions, and were hardly able to model them rather directly with, for example, time series analysis. Integrating content information helps to alleviate the problem in practical systems, but the domain-dependent content knowledge is expensive to obtain due to the large amount of manual efforts. In this paper, we make use of the large volume of textual reviews for the automatic extraction of domain knowledge, namely, the explicit features aspects in a specific product domain. We thus degrade the product-level modeling of user preferences, which suffers from the lack of data, to the feature-level modeling, which not only grants us the ability to predict user preferences through direct time series analysis, but also allows us to know the essence under the surface of product-level changes in purchasing patterns. Besides, the expanded feature space also helps to make cold-start recommendations for users with few purchasing records. Technically, we develop the Fourier-assisted Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (FARIMA) process to tackle with the year-long seasonal period of purchasing data to achieve daily-aware preference predictions, and we leverage the conditional opportunity models for daily-aware personalized recommendation. Extensive experimental results on real-world cosmetic purchasing data from a major e-commerce website (JD.com) in China verified both the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.