Cross-Platform Item Recommendation for Online Social E-Commerce

Social e-commerce, as a new concept of e-commerce, uses social media as a new prevalent platform for online shopping. Users are now able to view, add to cart, and buy products within a single social media app. In this paper, we address the problem of cross-platform recommendation for social e-commerce, i.e., recommending products to users when they are shopping through social media. To the best of our knowledge, this is a new and important problem for all e-commerce companies (e.g., Amazon, Alibaba), but it has never been studied before. Existing cross-platform and social-related recommendation methods cannot be applied directly to this problem since they do not co-consider the social information and the cross-platform characteristics together. To study this problem, we collect two real-world datasets from social e-commerce services. We first investigate the heterogeneous shopping behaviors between traditional e-commerce app and social media. Based on these observations from data, we propose CROSS (Cross-platform Recommendation for Online Shopping in Social Media), a recommendation framework utilizing not only user-item interaction data on both platforms, but also social relation data on social media. The framework is general, and we propose two variants, CROSS-MF and CROSS-NCF. Extensive experiments on two real-world social e-commerce datasets demonstrate that our proposed CROSS significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.