E-commerce cart recommendation effects: A field experiment on entertainment products

This study aims to compare the effects of e-cart recommendation and homepage recommendation in the field of entertainment products on the basis of a field experiment involving almost 13000 consumers supported by one of the leading digital reading platforms in China. The results indicate that e-cart recommendations have a significant positive impact on consumer downloads in comparison with homepage recommendations. Moreover, this positive effect decreases when the alternatives in the e-cart are of a larger quantity but increases when consumers are more active. Interestingly, this study also finds that e-cart recommendations can spill over to other products, leading to more downloads of non-recommended items. Our findings provide novel insights into consumer responses to e-cart recommendations of entertainment products for researchers and managers alike.