A Gamified Word of Mouth Recommendation System for Increasing Customer Purchase

Abstract

Nowadays, gamification is implemented in different software applications to increase user engagement. On the other hand, the recommendation systems have been around for a long time to suggest related products to customers. Although numerous recommendation systems have proposed up to now, to the best of our knowledge, there is no study on the Word of Mouth (WOM) recommendation system that benefits from gamification to recommend products to customers in e-commerce websites. In this paper, we have proposed a gamified word of mouth recommendation system to fill this gap. We aim to encourage users to recommend products to each other through Word of Mouth by using gamification methods. The proposed recommendation system has implemented on an e-commerce website. Experimental results show that the proposed method is successful in increasing the customers’ purchases and unique visits. Using the proposed WOM recommendation system, the average number of female customers’ visits increased by 116%, and the average number of male customers’ visits increased by 100%. Moreover, the ratio of the number of unique customers to the number of purchases has decreased by 7%. Meaning, the count of purchases by customers has increased.