Effect of Filtering Function on User Search Cost and How to Enable the Creation of this Function

Abstract: It has been noticed that one of the main challenges for e-commerce sites is providing the users with an efficient search function. It has also been noticed that the search function is one of the things the user is valuing the most when evaluating an e-commerce. The information technology enables the possibility to consume almost anything one could wish for. The challenge is in how to find this specific item. It is hence of interest to examine how to improve the search tool and what effect the updated search tool results in. The objective of this research is twofold. The objective motivated by economic factors is to examine how a user’s ability to find relevant items is affected by being able to refine a search result by selecting relevant attribute values. The other objective has a more technical character and is to examine how the rule based method performs in terms of extracting attribute values for enable the creation of the filtering function. The examinations for this research is conducted at a Swedish online auction company that due to the structure of its e-catalogue provides a suitable setup for the examinations. Because of the examinations being conducted in the environment of the auction company’s system this limits the result to only being representative for data with the same characteristics as the auction company’s. For answering the questions stated in the objective two methods are applied. One for examining the economic part and one for examining the technical part. The economic question is answered after analysing the result of an A/B-test conducted at the auction company. For answering the technical examination an information extraction technique is evaluated. The result of the economical examination is that a significant increase in conversion rate can be concluded for the system version with filtering enabled. The result of the technical examination shows that the rule based method can be used for information extraction in some cases. However, the obtained accuracy will be affected by the characteristics of the data the information extraction is performed on.