ABSTRACT Date: 2024 Level: Bachelor Thesis in Business Administration, 15 cr Institution: School of Business, Society and Engineering, Mälardalen University Authors: Tatiana Bernard, Alexia; Parvin, Maryam; Ram, Mahabad Title: Beyond the Click: Unveiling the Influence of AI Personalization on E-commerce Impulse Buys Supervisor: Emre Yildiz Keywords: AI personalized recommendations, impulsive buying behavior, perceived value, perceived scarcity, perceived positive emotions. Research question: How does AI-powered personalized product recommendations influence impulsive buying behavior in e-commerce, potentially mediated by underlying psychological mechanisms? Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the link between AI-powered personalized product recommendations and consumers’ impulsive buying on e-commerce platforms. The research explores how these personalized recommendations might influence customers towards impulsive purchases through perceived value, scarcity, and positive emotions as mediating factors. Method: This study utilized a quantitative research methodology, employing online surveys to collect data from active online shoppers. To ensure a comprehensive sample, both convenience and purposive sampling techniques were implemented, aiming to represent a broad spectrum of online shopping behaviors. Conclusion: This study reveals that AI-powered personalized product recommendations significantly influence impulsive buying behaviors on e-commerce platforms. By examining the mediating effects of perceived value, scarcity, and positive emotions, the research highlights how personalized recommendations can drive impulsive purchases. The findings underscore the importance of sophisticated recommendation systems in enhancing consumer engagement and satisfaction while raising important ethical considerations about consumer manipulation and long-term satisfaction. This study provides valuable insights for businesses looking to balance effective marketing strategies with ethical consumer practices.

Nowadays when users navigate in internet they find lots of types of communication scattered across diverse sites. Due to the lack of users’ interests in advertisements, primarily caused by not matching their preferences, today’s advertisements have a low rate of success. Recently, owing to semantic web generation, some companies started to use personalized marketing in communication as a way to turn the conversions around and thus increase customer retention and loyalty. As a matter of fact, the retention and loyalty stages on the internet are, on average, the least crafted of the whole cycle. The customers’ conception of one-to-one marketing is quite ambiguous as they conceive that they need to be more efficient while shopping online but at the same time they feel stalked due to privacy concerns, and oversaturated with non-valuable information. The purpose of this paper is to explore from a holistic view online personalized communication strategies and how they can be implemented in order to increase customer satisfaction thus retaining customers and, in the long-term, gaining their loyalty. The main communication areas the study treats ranges from onsite the online store, where the company wants to sell the product, to offsite advertisements in websites, social media platforms and via email. In the empirical section, the study carried out a quantitative online survey to investigate customers’ perception and complete it with the literature. To answer the research questions, the study identified 19 hypotheses comprising of all primary aspects that define the exploration. The result could be gold dust for e-shop managers to help them maximize the marketing communication factor using personalization. The authors identified potential improvements to motivate customers to register in the online shop, whether communication channels are suited to implementing the strategy or not, and possible aspects to adapt in order to obtain maximal benefits. There were some limitations in terms of an analysis of the companies’ point of view and the necessity to analyze every communication channel more in depth as the study is an initial step.