You Are What You Bought: Generating Customer Personas for E-commerce Applications
Yimin Shi, Yang Fei, Shiqi Zhang, Haixun Wang, Xiaokui Xiao · 2025
In e-commerce, user representations are essential for various applications. Existing methods often use deep learning techniques to convert customer behaviors into implicit embeddings. However, these embeddings are difficult to understand and integrate with external knowledge, limiting the effectiveness of applications such as customer segmentation, search navigation, and product recommendations. To address this, our paper introduces the concept of the customer persona. Condensed from a customer's numerous purchasing histories, a customer persona provides a multi-faceted and human-readable characterization of specific purchase behaviors and preferences, such as Busy Parents or Bargain Hunters.