The effect of the product categories diversity recommended on cross‐buying in electronic commerce platforms: The moderating role of user navigation heterogeneity

Abstract E‐commerce platforms encourage consumers' cross‐buying behavior to boost user traffic and trading volume. However, balancing the precision and richness of recommended information with the mechanisms influencing consumer cross‐buying remains unclear, which also poses challenges to the specific operation of these platforms. Therefore, this study leverages extensive online behavioral data from an e‐commerce platform, encompassing detailed records of 26,034 consumers. By employing unsupervised machine learning algorithms to distinguish the heterogeneity of consumer browsing, we apply clickstream data to explore the mechanisms of the impact of information diversity, specifically the breadth and depth of recommended product categories, on cross‐buying. This study reveals that the effect of diverse recommendations on online decision‐making undergoes marginal variations due to alterations in both the breadth and depth of these recommendations. Specifically, the depth and breadth of recommended product categories exhibit an inverted U‐shaped relationship with cross‐buying, initially promoting, and subsequently suppressing it. Additionally, consumers with different browsing behavior characteristics respond differently to recommendation diversity. Confused visitors and hedonic visitors positively moderate the depth of information and negatively moderate the breadth of recommendations with the inverted U‐shaped effect on cross‐buying. Search‐oriented visitors positively adjust the inverted U‐shaped relationship between the depth of information and the breadth of recommendations on consumer cross‐buying. This study enriches research on cross‐buying in the domain of recommendations on e‐commerce platforms from the perspective of information diversity, providing valuable insights for optimizing recommendation strategies, promoting cross‐buying behavior, and enhancing consumer loyalty.