Image placement order optimization for mobile commerce

With the increase in popularity of mobile commerce, the placement order of images on mobile displays is an important factor to attract and retain customers' attention. In this paper, we propose a novel method to optimize the placement of item images based upon the relative attractiveness of each image to the customer. To judge this, the proposed method estimates the leave rate of the customer at each image for each ordering using a model based on unsupervised hierarchical clustering. This allows estimating the expected leave rate for different image placements, solving an optimization problem to obtain the best ordering. The model is evaluated using a dataset collected from Rakuten Ichiba, the largest e-commerce site in Japan.