ReducE-Comm: Effective Inventory Reduction System for E-Commerce

Many e-commerce platforms serve as an intermediary between companies/manufacturers and consumers, receiving a commission per purchase. To increase revenue, such sites tend to offer a wide variety of items. However, in many situations a smaller subset of the items should be selected and offered for sale, e.g., when opening an express branch or expanding to a new region, or when maintenance costs become prohibitive and redundant items should be disposed of. In all these cases selecting a reduced inventory which covers most consumer needs is an important goal. In this demo we introduce ReducE-Comm - a highly parallelizable and scalable system that given a large set of items, a bound on the number of items that can be supported and information about consumer preferences/items relationships, allows to select a subset of the items which maximizes the likelihood of a purchase. Our system is interactive and facilitates real-time analysis, by providing detailed per-item impact statistics. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ReducE-Comm on real-world data and scenarios taken from a large e-commerce system, by interacting with the CIKM'19 audience who act as analysts aiming to intelligently reduce the inventory.