Add-on selling strategies in an online open market

Abstract

Add-on selling can provide new chances to increase sellers' profits and meet customers' needs. Although prior studies have advocated add-on selling for its business value, there is an argument that add-on selling can cause customer repulsion. Therefore, we need to understand customer purchasing pattern related to add-on selling in order to promote it and to mitigate the customer repulsion. To that end, we applied data mining techniques to the 24,925 transactions of data from an online open market in Korea. We then conducted feature selection to investigate the most influential factors that can explain the characteristics of add-on selling transactions using a classification model. We also identified association rules among add-on selling and promotions. Finally, based on the findings in our experiments, we proposed add-on selling strategies for the target online market.