Machine-Learning-Based Approach for Anonymous Online Customer Purchase Intentions Using Clickstream Data

Abstract

Since online shopping has become an important way for consumers to make purchases, consumers have signed up to e-commerce platforms to shop online. However, retailers are beginning to realise the critical role of predicting anonymous consumer purchase intent to improve purchase conversion rates and store profitability. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the prediction of anonymous consumer purchase intent. This research presents a machine learning model (MBT-POP) for predicting customer purchase behaviour based on multi-behavioural trendiness (MBT) and product popularity (POP) using 33,339,730 clicks generated from 445,336 sessions of real e-commerce customers. The results show that the MBT-POP model can effectively predict the purchase behaviour of anonymous customers (F1 = 0.9031), and it achieves the best prediction result with a sliding window of 2 days. Compared to existing studies, the MBT-POP model not only improves the model performance, but also compresses the number of days required for accurate prediction. The present research has argued that product trendiness and popularity can significantly improve the predictive performance of the customer purchase behaviour model and can play an important role in predicting the purchase behaviour of anonymous customers.