A grocery recommendation for off-line shoppers

Purpose Many off-line retailers have experienced a slump in sales and have the potential risk of overstock or understock. To overcome these problems, retailers have applied data mining techniques, such as association rule mining or sequential association rule mining, to increase sales and predict product demand. However, because these techniques cannot generate shopper-centric rules, many off-line shoppers are often inconvenienced after writing their shopping lists carefully and comprehensively. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose a personalized recommendation methodology for off-line grocery shoppers. Design/methodology/approach This paper employs a Markov chain model to generate recommendations for the shopper’s next shopping basket. The proposed methodology is based on the knowledge of both purchased products and purchase sequences. This paper compares the proposed methodology with a traditional collaborative filtering (CF)-based system, a bestseller-based system and a Markov-chain-based system as benchmark systems. Findings The proposed methodology achieves improvements of 15.87, 14.06 and 37.74 percent with respect to the CF-, Markov chain-, and best-seller-based benchmark systems, respectively, meaning that not only the purchased products but also the purchase sequences are important elements in the personalization of grocery recommendations. Originality/value Most of the previous studies on this topic have proposed on-line recommendation methodologies. However, because off-line stores collect transaction data from point-of-sale devices, this research proposes a methodology based on purchased products and purchase patterns for off-line grocery recommendations. In practice, this study implies that both purchased products and purchase sequences are viable elements in off-line grocery recommendations.