Analysis of users’ behaviour in structured e-commerce websites

Abstract– Online shopping is becoming more and more common in our daily lives. Understanding users’ interests and behaviour is essential in order to adapt e-commerce websites to customers’ requirements. The information about users’ behaviour is stored in the web server logs. The analysis of such information has focused on applying data mining techniques where a rather static characterization is used to model users’ behaviour and the sequence of the actions performed by them is not usually considered. Therefore, incorporating a view of the process followed by users during a session can be of great interest to identify more complex behavioural patterns. To address this issue, this paper proposes a linear-temporal logic model checking approach for the analysis of structured e-commerce web logs. By defining a common way of mapping log records according to the e-commerce structure, web logs can be easily converted into event logs where the behaviour of users is captured. Then, different predefined queries can be performed to identify different behavioural patterns that consider the different actions performed by a user during a session. Finally, the usefulness of the proposed approach has been studied by applying it to a real case study of a Spanish e-commerce website. The results have identified interesting findings that have made possible to
propose some improvements in the website design with the aim of increasing its efficiency.