# A Cross-Platform Personalized Recommender System for Connecting E-Commerce and Social Network
## 4 Evaluation and Analysis
### Effects of a Promotional Microblog on Commodity Sales  
In this section, we study the following process: a shop owner who has Weibo account in a social network and has a number of followers releases a promotional microblog, namely, an advertisement of his products, which are available on an e-commerce platform. Would this microblog promote his product sales? Starting with this question, we do some experiments below. Firstly, several special users on Weibo has been chosen as shop owners and have shops (selling food, cosmetic, living goods, etc.) on Taobao (a famous e-commerce platform). When they release a promotional microblog for selling their own products, we track the microblog and collect the product's sale information from Taobao. Later, we analyze these sales data. In the instance of the promotional microblog shown in Figure 8, one of the shop owners has a Weibo account (his homepage: [[http://weibo.com/wysr2007](http://weibo.com/wysr2007)]([http://weibo.com/wysr2007](http://weibo.com/wysr2007)) (accessed on 7 March 2022)) and a shop on an e-commerce site (shop link: [[https://shop70713800.taobao.com/](https://shop70713800.taobao.com/)]([https://shop70713800.taobao.com/](https://shop70713800.taobao.com/)) (accessed on 7 March 2022)). The number of his followers is more than one million nine hundred thousand. The promotional microblog in Figure 8 was released by this shop owner to announce that there would be a discount in his shop. In total, it received 1009 forwards, 368 comments and 433 praises. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline
**No.** & **Information Type** \\ \hline
1 & Commodity’s title \\ \hline
2 & Commodity’s category \\ \hline
3 & Detail description of commodity \\ \hline
4 & Sell recorder of commodity \\ \hline
5 & Commodity’s reviews \\ \hline
6 & Sales \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 3: Six types of information collected from e-business platform. Figure 7: The detailed process of collecting data. In this experiment, five different promotional microblogs are selected and analyzed, and detailed information about them is shown in Table 4.  
After these microblogs were released, we kept track of all of the commodities sales in the e-business stores and collected their sales information. Figure 9 shows the metabolic curves of different shop owners' commodities sales. In these figures, the abscissa denotes the time and each unit of abscissa represents one day, while the zero abscissa indicates the day that the shop owner released the promotional microblog, and the ordinate denotes the sale volume of shop on e-commerce. To display the change clearly, we use a red line to indicate places where the commodities sales are larger than before. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c} \hline \hline \multirow{2}{*}{**Shop Owner Information**} & \multicolumn{4}{c}{**Information of Five Promotional Microblogs**} & **Commodity Types that** \\ \cline{2-7}  & **Followers** & **Forward** & **Like** & **Comment** & **A Brief Overview of** & **the Shop Owner Sell on** \\  & **Number** & **Number** & **Number** & **Number** & **Microblog Contents** & **E-Business Platform** \\ \hline  & & & & & 1. Discount on & \\  & & & & & & & \\  & & & & & & & \\  & & & & & & & \\  
From these curves, we can observe that, after these shop owners released their promotional microblogs, there was an obvious upward trend of their shops' sales volumes. For shop owners 1, 4 and 5, their commodities sales appeared to peak after they released the promotional microblogs. For shop owner 2 and 3, there exist a continuously higher sales volume than the days before. Although these sales curves move differently, their general tendency is to go up, which means that promotional microblogs certainly have a facilitating function for promoting sales. In other words, a social network has ability to play a role in creating economical value for e-commerce, which gives meaning to our research field.