Product adoption · Empirical analysis of website server-log data matched to sales data, controlling for consumers' historical purchasing behavior. The design compares directed search, nondirected search, and recommendation-system usage and estimates their relationships
Technology Usage and Online Sales: An Empirical Study
Management Science · 2010
Summary
Information-technology usage significantly affects sales, but effects differ by technology and product. Directed search increases sales of promoted products but decreases sales of nonpromoted products; recommendation-system use increases sales of both; nondirected search has an insignificant effect on online sales.
For your marketing
Possible founder application
Use it as a B2B mechanism or sales-process design reference. Validate the relationship in your deal size, buying committee and sales cycle.
Reported result
What the study found
Information-technology usage significantly affects sales, but effects differ by technology and product. Directed search increases sales of promoted products but decreases sales of nonpromoted products; recommendation-system use increases sales of both; nondirected search has an insignificant effect on online sales.
Research question
What the authors investigated
How do online consumers use search and recommendation technologies, and how does that usage affect online sales and purchasing patterns?
Design
Empirical analysis of website server-log data matched to sales data, controlling for consumers' historical purchasing behavior. The design compares directed search, nondirected search, and recommendation-system usage and estimates their relationships with sales of promoted and nonpromoted products.
Sample and setting
An online-shopping website's consumers and product transactions; the publisher page identifies a unique server-log/sales dataset but does not report the number of consumers or observations in the abstract/page metadata fetched.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
Limitations are not explicitly stated on the fetched publisher page; the page does not identify the site's industry or report sample size, so external validity and scale cannot be assessed from the publisher evidence alone.
Research sources
The publisher abstract says the authors measure technology usage from server logs, match it to sales while controlling for historical purchasing, and find technology- and product-specific effects: directed search helps promoted products but hurts nonpromoted products, recommendation systems help both, and nondirected search is insignificant. Direct publisher-page retrieval was recorded on 2026-10-09; profile summarizes the accessible record and does not claim independent review of inaccessible full text.