Do You Buy or Not? The Effect of Recommender Slogans on Retail Sites

Abstract

Recommender systems solve the current information overload problem in the online world. By predicting and presenting relevant information, web users do not need to waste time searching and browsing for contents that they are interested in. However, in addition to the accurate contents, slogans associated catching the customers’ eyes are worthy of exploration. This study aims to discover the effects of various recommender slogans. Two categories of slogans were designed in the study: slogans associated with customer inputs and slogans associated with price promotion. Actual customers’ webpage clickstreams and purchase decisions were collected from a Taiwanese retail shopping Website. The effects of recommender slogans on product categories are different. Customers generally were drawn by the slogans associated with price promotion. This study brought to light the effects of different slogans on online shoppers. With the empirical findings, this study provides online retailers important guidelines regarding online customers’ behaviors towards the employment of recommender slogans.