Empirical analysis of customer behaviors in Chinese e-commerce

With the burgeoning e-Business websites, E-Commerce in China has been developing rapidly in recent years. From the analysis of Chinese E-Commerce market, it is possible to discover customer purchasing patterns or behavior characteristics, which are indispensable knowledge for the expansion of Chinese E-Commerce market. This paper presents an empirical analysis on the sale transactions from the 360buy website based on the analysis of time interval distributions in perspectives of customers. Results reveal that in most situations the time intervals approximately obey the power-law distribution over two orders of magnitudes. Additionally, time interval on customer’s successive purchase can reflect how loyal a customer is to a specific product category. Moreover, we also find an interesting phenomenon about human behaviors that could be related to psychology of customers. In general, customers’ requirements in different product categories are similar. The investigation into individual behaviors may help researchers understand how customers’ group behaviors generated.