Personalization Research in E-Commerce - a State of the Art Review (2000-2008)

ABSTRACT E-commerce product personalization and website personalization have been a topic of interest to a lot of researchers during the last years. As such, academic research in the area of personalization in e-commerce should rely on a rigorous literature review first in order to identify existing research and acknowledge the state of the art in research. This article provides a vast overview on personalization literature with a special focus on e-commerce (e.g. recommender systems). This literature, respectively our approach, can be used by fellow researchers to identify the basic literature for their own work. It serves as a rigorous way of retrieving literature for other fields in their scientific research. A complete reference list is presented as well as additional figures and tables analyzing the personalization literature in general and according to an emerging classification. The three major categories of personalization research in e-commerce are: "implementation", "theoretical foundations", and "user centric aspects" under which there are several subcategories into which the papers can be classified. The reviewed articles (42 in total out of 15,116) were taken from all the relevant, high ranked (A to C) journals according to the journal ranking list: JOURQUAL2. Keywords: personalization, e-commerce, state of the art, classification, literature review 1. Introduction Personalization plays an important role for service providers in modern e-commerce strategies; it is important to build up a tight customer relationship in order to address customers personally. Speaking about personalization in e-commerce brings up the problems of identifying a customer, gathering information around the customer, and processing data to make a service seem personally adopted for a certain customer (e.g. recommender systems or comparison-shopping systems). One needs to look at two different business software systems when analyzing customer self-service applications in e-commerce (enabling the customer to use services on their own through personalization): (1) ERP systems as back-office systems and (2) Web applications (mainly e-shops) as front-office applications. Personalization is a means of facilitating this ease of use by presenting the customer with a pre-defined service for personal needs [Risch 2007]. It is an interdisciplinary topic with which research papers in the field of marketing and computer science have increasingly been concerned. In order to give researchers a deeper insight into the facets of personalization in e-commerce and to offer a starting-point for this research, the outcome of a rigorous literature investigation on personalization from the field of IS research is presented. The following sections will give an overview on the current literature in the area of e-commerce personalization. The research methodology used for this research is based on a reasonable way for retrieving relevant articles. With the above-mentioned literature in mind, we started our research with an initial set of keywords for our title-based search (section 3). In section 4, we discuss the emerging classification of the collected articles to summarize the results in section 5. Afterwards, we discuss our contribution to the research on personalization (section 6) and point out the limitations (section 7) and future directions of our research (section 8). Founding our research on existing literature makes it a form of secondary research with an explorative and descriptive focus. This article? s structure is derived and inspired from several literature review articles published in the International Journal Production Economics [Ngai et al. 2007], International Journal Management and Enterprise Development [Moon 2007], Communications of the Association for Information Systems [Lee et al. 2003], and the Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems [vom Brocke et al. 2009]. 2. …