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Turning Clicks into Purchases: Revenue Optimization for Product Search in E-Commerce

Published: 27 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

In recent years, product search engines have emerged as a key factor for online businesses. According to a recent survey, over 55% of online customers begin their online shopping journey by searching on an E-Commerce (EC) website like Amazon as opposed to a generic web search engine like Google. Information retrieval research to date has been focused on optimizing search ranking algorithms for web documents while little attention has been paid to product search. There are several intrinsic differences between web search and product search that make the direct application of traditional search ranking algorithms to EC search platforms difficult. First, the success of web and product search is measured differently; one seeks to optimize for relevance while the other must optimize for both relevance and revenue. Second, when using real-world EC transaction data, there is no access to manually annotated labels. In this paper, we address these differences with a novel learning framework for EC product search called LETORIF (LEarning TO Rank with Implicit Feedback). In this framework, we utilize implicit user feedback signals (such as user clicks and purchases) and jointly model the different stages of the shopping journey to optimize for EC sales revenue. We conduct experiments on real-world EC transaction data and introduce a a new evaluation metric to estimate expected revenue after re-ranking. Experimental results show that LETORIF outperforms top competitors in improving purchase rates and total revenue earned.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGIR '18: The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval
      June 2018
      1509 pages
      ISBN:9781450356572
      DOI:10.1145/3209978
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      Published: 27 June 2018

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      Author Tags

      1. e-commerce
      2. revenue
      3. search logs

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      SIGIR '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 86 of 409 submissions, 21%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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