Customer acquisition and onboarding at an online grocery company

Abstract: The master thesis is carried out in a collaboration with a Swedish online grocery company. The goal of the thesis is to investigate if it is possible to explain the underlying factors that affect new customers to be retained. Because of the difficulties of defining churn and retention in non-contractual settings, most of the literature is focused on contractual and subscription settings. There are a limited number of studies when trying to predict customer churn in non-contractual businesses and even fewer studies that emphasize retention. This thesis aims to contribute to the field of retention in non-contractual business and also highlight the assumptions and drawbacks of churn-related task.  To achieve the goal of the thesis a literature review is carried out together with two statistical learning approaches; logistic regression model and extreme gradient boosting model. The results shows that it is possible to find the underlying factors that drive customers to be retained. The greatest drivers that could increase the probability of retaining new customers are the days between the first and second order, the second order value, and the total order value.