A Real-Time Whole Page Personalization Framework for E-Commerce

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable real-time personalization system for e-commerce homepages that dynamically ranks carousels to improve user engagement and business metrics, demonstrated through Walmart's online grocery platform.

Contribution

The work presents a novel, flexible model and system architecture for real-time ranking of page components, optimized for low latency and extendable to various settings.

Findings

Increased user engagement and item discovery.

Significant lift in add-to-carts per visitor.

Effective online evaluation benchmarks.

Abstract

E-commerce platforms consistently aim to provide personalized recommendations to drive user engagement, enhance overall user experience, and improve business metrics. Most e-commerce platforms contain multiple carousels on their homepage, each attempting to capture different facets of the shopping experience. Given varied user preferences, optimizing the placement of these carousels is critical for improved user satisfaction. Furthermore, items within a carousel may change dynamically based on sequential user actions, thus necessitating online ranking of carousels. In this work, we present a scalable end-to-end production system to optimally rank item-carousels in real-time on the Walmart online grocery homepage. The proposed system utilizes a novel model that captures the user's affinity for different carousels and their likelihood to interact with previously unseen items. Our system is flexible in design and is easily extendable to settings where page components need to be ranked. We provide the system architecture consisting of a model development phase and an online inference framework. To ensure low-latency, various optimizations across these stages are implemented. We conducted extensive online evaluations to benchmark against the prior experience. In production, our system resulted in an improvement in item discovery, an increase in online engagement, and a significant lift on add-to-carts (ATCs) per visitor on the homepage.