Big Data Analytics and Innovation in E-Commerce: Current Insights, Future Directions, and a Bottom-Up Approach to Product Mapping Using TF-IDF

Abstract

Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) is a bottom-up technique to product mapping that is used in this study to investigate the application of big data analytics and novel approaches in e-commerce. Little and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) are still understudied, despite the focus of traditional study on major manufacturers and retailers. A thorough product map study is required to comprehend product linkages, complementarity, and competitive dynamics, as SMEs have become more prominent, especially since the COVID-19 epidemic. The creation of comprehensive product maps is suggested by this paper by using crowd intelligence from SME e-commerce sites. The study employs TF-IDF to measure word significance in product titles and descriptions by gathering data from more than 52 SME sites, which contains information on over 90,000 goods. By building a product map with cosine similarity metrics, hierarchical community structures are made visible. Results show that items on the same website often create different communities, exposing competitive dynamics and supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in making strategic decisions about pricing, product offerings, and marketing strategies. To improve text discrimination accuracy, the study emphasizes the necessity for sophisticated natural language processing methods like N-grams. While highlighting the decentralized and varied character of SME e-commerce data, it also highlights the study gap in this area. In addition to providing SMEs with insights to enhance their market positioning, resource allocation, and customer engagement strategies, the study fills in these gaps in the literature on e-commerce. To improve SME resilience and predictive capacities in the dynamic digital economy, future research should encompass real-time analytics, broaden the scope of data sources, and investigate the approach's application across many industries.