Personalized Recommendation During Customer Shopping Journey

Abstract

E-commerce has penetrated deep into the milieu of today’s generation and has overtaken traditional commerce. Compared to traditional commerce, a few aspects like the absence of physical products, salespeople, and restricted spaces make it more dependent on the technologies that support consumers to make decisions. Simultaneously, consumers are inundated with a plethora of online information, creating confusion in their minds. Recommender Agents tend to assist customers by decreasing the information overload and presenting focused and curated content known as personalized recommendations (PR). Authors consolidated previous research in the field and thematically categorized them into (1) Technology Acceptance, (2) Persuasion, (3) Attitude formation (4) Human-Recommender interaction (5) Consumer response (6) Consumer decision-making. The present chapter bridges the research gaps by consolidating the extant interactive marketing literature to develop a comprehensive model and identify future research directions by superimposing the framework of customer shopping journey. Due to the growing popularity of personalized recommendations in interactive marketing, literature has grown multifold, but the authors found that their role in purchase and post-purchase stages of customer shopping journey have received scant attention. The literature is silent in understanding the importance of personalized recommendations, offline conversions, interaction between e-commerce and product brands to create a balance between perceived risk and trust, and the role of e-commerce customer service in repeat purchase and customer loyalty.