Predicting E-commerce customer satisfaction: Traditional machine learning vs. deep learning approaches

Abstract

The rapid growth of e-commerce has increased the need for retailers to understand and predict customer satisfaction to support data-driven managerial decisions. This study analyzes online consumer behavior through a comparative machine learning modeling approach to forecast future customer satisfaction based on review ratings. Using a large dataset of over 100 k online orders from a major retailer, traditional machine learning models including random forest and support vector machines are benchmarked against deep learning techniques like multi-layer perceptrons. The predictive models are assessed for their ability to accurately predict customer satisfaction scores for the next orders based on key e-commerce features including delivery time, order value, and location. The findings demonstrate that the random forest model can predict future satisfaction with 92% accuracy, outperforming deep learning. The analysis further identifies core drivers of satisfaction such as delivery time and order accuracy. These insights enable retail managers to make targeted improvements, like optimizing logistics, to increase customer loyalty and revenue. This study provides a framework for leveraging predictive analytics and machine learning to unlock data-driven insights into online consumer behavior and satisfaction for superior retail decision-making. The focus on generalizable insights across a major retailer enhances the practical applicability of the machine learning approach for the retail sector.