Product badges are ubiquitous in e-commerce platforms, acting as effective psychological triggers to nudge customers to buy specific products, boosting revenues. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no attempt to systematically study these badges and their several idiosyncrasies - we intend to close this gap in our current work. Specifically, we try to answer questions such as: How long does a product retain a badge on a given platform? If a product is sold on different platforms, then does it receive similar badges? How do the products that receive badges differ from those which do not, in terms of price, customer rating, etc. We collect longitudinal data from several e-commerce platforms over 45 days, and find that although most of the badges are short-lived, there are several permanent badge assignments and that too for badges meant to denote urgency or scarcity. Furthermore, it is unclear how the badge assignments are done, and we find evidence that highly-rated products are missing out on badges compared to lower quality ones. Our work calls for greater transparency in the badge assignment process to inform customers, as well as to reduce dissatisfaction among the sellers dependent on the platforms for their revenues.
翻译:产品徽章在电子商务平台中普遍存在,作为有效的心理触发因素,促使客户购买特定产品,增加收入。然而,据我们所知,没有试图系统地研究这些徽章及其若干特异性,我们打算弥补当前工作中的这一差距。具体地说,我们试图回答以下问题:产品在某个平台上保留徽章的时间有多长?如果产品在不同平台上销售,那么是否得到类似的徽章?获得的徽章与那些在价格、客户评级等方面没有区别的产品有何不同?我们从几个电子商务平台收集了45天的长视数据,发现尽管大多数徽章是短命的,但有几项永久性的徽章分配,对于标牌也意味着紧迫性或稀缺性。此外,我们不清楚徽章分配是如何完成的,我们发现有证据表明,高等级产品在徽章上缺失,而质量则较低。我们的工作要求提高徽章分配过程的透明度,以便通知客户,同时减少卖方对奖牌的不满意度。