From amazon to apple: Modeling online retail sales, purchase incidence, and visit behavior

A Panagiotelis; MS Smith; PJ Danaher

Journal article

From amazon to apple: Modeling online retail sales, purchase incidence, and visit behavior

A Panagiotelis, MS Smith, PJ Danaher

Journal of Business and Economic Statistics | Published : 2014

DOI: 10.1080/07350015.2013.835729

Abstract

In this study, we propose a multivariate stochastic model forWeb site visit duration, page views, purchase incidence, and the sale amount for online retailers. Themodel is constructed by composition from carefully selected distributions and involves copula components. It allows for the strong nonlinear relationships between the sales and visit variables to be explored in detail, and can be used to construct sales predictions. The model is readily estimated using maximum likelihood, making it an attractive choice in practice given the large sample sizes that are commonplace in online retail studies. We examine a number of top-ranked U.S. online retailers, and find that the visit duration and ..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Michael Smith Author

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Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council

Funding Acknowledgements

The authors thank comScore for providing the online panel data, as well as two anonymous referees, an AE, and Editor for comments that helped improve the article. The work of Michael Smith and Peter Danaher was partially supported by Australian Research Council Grants DP1094289 and FT110100729, and Anastasios Panagiotelis by an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship.