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The online retail market shows a sharp increase in traffic during holiday sales. The ability to distinguish customers who will likely purchase is critical for provisioning traffic and for providing cost-effective promotions. This paper uniquely studies the browsing and purchasing behaviors of online shoppers during a yearly sale event in China, the world’s largest online marketplace. Based on 31 million action logs gathered from wide residential areas, we characterize the steps leading to purchases and determine their precursors. We investigate the effect of time (e.g., date, time of date), environment (e.g., platform, viewed category), and action (e.g., session time, clicks, sequence) on purchases. Action cues from shopping behaviors can be used for early detection. While most shoppers start with strong intentions to purchase, yet the moment of ordering comes rather impulsively within 30 seconds to several minutes of browsing. The predictive accuracy reaches as a high AUC of 0.924. The findings in this paper provide an understanding of traffic during mega sale events that can help online shops plan and provide a better user experience for upcoming shopping festivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops and tests a primary conceptual model of the direct effects of business environment on supply chain integration (SCI) and an alternative moderation model to better understand the role of the environment in developing integration and financial performance improvement. Structural equation modeling and moderated regression are used to analyze the survey data collected from manufacturing firms in China. The results reveal significant positive relationships between environmental dynamism and all three dimensions of SCI, and between environmental hostility and internal integration. The results also indicate that internal integration fully mediates the relationships between environmental hostility and both customer and supplier integration. Supplier integration is significantly and positively associated with financial performance, whereas internal and customer integration are not significantly associated with performance. Importantly, through the test of an alternative model, environmental hostility and environmental dynamism are shown to affect SCI directly, rather than moderating the SCI-performance relationship. This article provides useful guidelines for managers to develop integrated supply chains to improve the financial performance under dynamic and hostile environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]