Post-purchase recommendations in large-scale online marketplaces

Measuring the Business Value of Recommender Systems

“…In the special problem se ing of "similar item recommendations", i.e., the recommendation of items in the context of a reference item, researchers at eBay have repeatedly reported on CTR improvements that were obtained through be er algorithms [13,16,46,47]. In [46], for example, a 38 % CTR increase was observed in comparison to a simple title-based recommendation method; in [47], a 36 % improvement in terms of the CTR was obtained for the "related-item recommendations" at the post-purchase page at eBay via a co-purchase mining approach. In [13], nally, only a minor increase in CTR (of about 3 %) was observed when applying a novel ranking method instead of a manually tuned linear model.…”

“…Given the insights from the literature [5,20,27,46,47], it is undisputed that recommender systems can have positive business e ects in a variety of ways. However, how large these e ects actually are-compared to a situation without a recommender system or with a di erent algorithmis not always clear.…”

“…Typically, however, they assess the value of a recommendation system more directly in terms of business value. Relevant business measures in that context include sales or revenue, click-through rates (CTR), higher user engagement, or customer retention rates [26,27,33,73].Given the insights from the literature [5,20,27,46,47], it is undisputed that recommender systems can have positive business e ects in a variety of ways. However, how large these e ects actually are-compared to a situation without a recommender system or with a di erent algorithmis not always clear.…”