Recent views vs recently bought: A study of impact on customer purchase in e-commerce

Abstract

Retail e-commerce has been a fast-growing industry all over the world for the last decade or so facilitated by increased digitalization and ever-growing technology making data cheaper and accessible for more and more people. So, firms have been using various innovative techniques to market their products online to increase sales along with enhancing profitability. Deep discounts, enhanced & attractive product catalog, number of views, number of recent purchases, limited edition is some of those techniques used. Among these metrics, we would like to study the effect of number of recent views and number of recent buys on the purchase behavior of customers. The objective of our study 1s to compare the influence of number of recent views of the product and number of times the product is recently purchased with the purchase intention of the customer for products purchased online. Customers are wooed in a variety of ways by these platforms, including the existence of customer evaluations, the offer of discounts and promotions, the use of an easy payment mechanism for convenience, availability information, and so on. We intended to examine at the customers’ purchasing intentions while they looked at internet adverts in our study. I. Number of customers viewed and bought the product II. Number of customers viewed the product III. Number of customers bought the product Null and alternate hypotheses are established for our study using data from 15250 people who viewed the product vs. 2745 people who bought it. For our sample study, we used Qualtrics to create a survey with a set of questions that essentially capture the purchase intents of customers by displaying three adverts of the same product and price with three different information based on the hypothesis. We used descriptive statistics and statistical methods to analyze the responses we received. In terms of the customers’ intent to purchase and the appealing of the commercial, we may suggest that the ad with both number of views & number of bought information (Ad #1), is more compelling than only number of views (Ad #2) and only number of bought (Ad #3). Hence, combined information both number of views & bought shall provide better conversion rate to e-commerce players.