“I Think You’ll Like It”: Modelling the Online Purchase Behavior in Social E-commerce

Understanding the roles of social factors in online purchase behavior has been a long standing research problem. The recently emerging social e-commerce platforms leverage the stimulated word-of-mouth effect to promote the sales of items, which offers a peek into the complex interplay between the social influence and online purchasing behavior. In this paper, we investigate this problem on a full-scale purchase behavior dataset from one of the leading social e-commerce platforms, Beidian. Specifically, we conduct a comparison study between the social e-commerce and conventional e-commerce that are both integrated in Beidian to examine how social factors affect user's purchase behavior. We reveal that social e-commerce leads to a 3.09$\sim$10.37 times higher purchase conversion rate compared with the conventional settings, which indicates users make purchase with significantly fewer item explorations. Then, we propose and validate four primary mechanisms that contribute to the efficient purchase conversion: \emph{better matching}, \emph{social enrichment}, \emph{social proof} and \emph{price sensitivity}. Moreover, we identify several behavioral indicators that are able to measure the effect of these mechanisms, based on which we design an accurate predictive model (AUC=0.7738) for user's purchase decision. These results combine to shed light on how to understand and model the purchase behavior in social e-commerce.