CROSS: Cross-platform Recommendation for 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 has never been studied before. Existing cross-platform and social related recommendation methods cannot be applied directly for this problem since they do not co-consider the social information and the cross-platform characteristics together. To study this problem, 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 model utilizing not only user-item interaction data on both platforms, but also social relation data on social media. Extensive experiments on real-world online shopping dataset demonstrate that our proposed CROSS significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.