Impact of product recommendation on consumer buying behaviour in e-commerce

Abstract

The e-commerce companies are increasingly using product recommendations to personalize the search results for a customer. However, various studies conducted in the past on the effectiveness of product recommendations suggest different effect on the purchase intention. Thus, the objective of our research study was to understand the effect of product recommendations displayed on the product page on the purchase intention of the main product. A hypothesis-driven approach was used, followed by an experimental survey study to understand the difference in the purchase intention of two groups. The data collected through this survey was statistically analyzed by running a Univariate ANCOVA in SPSS tool. The results of the analysis showed negligible difference in the means of two groups and came out to be insignificant, making it infeasible to reject the hypothesis. However, there were number of limitations in the study which can be attributed to the obtained results. We believe that a more rigorous study can be conducted by increasing the sample size, tapping into a heterogenous base of respondents, and by controlling all the exogenous variables. This way, we would be able to obtain better results and understand the effect of product recommendations with better significance