A prediction model for the purchase probability of anonymous customers to support real time web marketing: a case study

Abstract

The rapid growth of e-commerce has provided both an opportunity to create new values in the online marketplace and dramatic competition to survive. To survive in a competitive environment, Internet shopping malls attempt to adopt and use Customer Relationship Management. However, previous researches focused on navigation patterns of customers with membership. Therefore, they failed to apply real time web marketing to anonymous customers who navigate web pages without personal login. To overcome the problems noted above, we propose a methodology for predicting the purchase probability of anonymous customers to support real time web marketing. The proposed methodology is composed of two phases: (1) extracting purchase patterns and (2) predicting purchase probability. Purchase pattern provides marketing implications to web marketers while the purchase probability provides an opportunity for real time web marketing by predicting the purchase probability of an anonymous customer. The proposed methodology can be applied to the real time web marketing such as navigation shortcuts, product recommendations and better customer inducement since anonymous customers are included in marketing target and significant navigation pattern for purchase is identified. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.