A Crowdsourcing and Gamification based Product Ranking Method for E-Commerce

Most of the time, when users want to decide whether to buy a product from an e-commerce website or not, they ask questions about a product or read the other users' comments to decide. Users' comments about a product, when positive, bring exceptional opportunity for sellers because it will act as word of mouth (WOM) advertisement and can increase their sales. On the other hand, users trust in WOM because the person who comments is not motivated to benefit from the sales of the products, but sharing experiences about a product with other customers is a motive. Hence WOM helps customers decide better to buy a product, and if it is positive, it can lead to a sale increase. However, the quality of the comments is another essential factor to be considered in e-commerce websites. Because wrong and misleading comments or answers to users' questions can increase sales at the cost of decreasing user satisfaction. In this study, for the first time, we have proposed a gamification method to increase the effectiveness of WOM by considering the quality of the user comments. To this end, an influence metric was proposed to calculate the products' ranking in a new fashion. To evaluate the proposed method, we collected data from an e-commerce website and compared it with classic product rankings methods. Experimental results show a significant difference between the product ranking using the proposed method compared with the classic product ranking methods, and overall it decreases product rankings.