Articles

Due to influence of Internet, this e-commerce sector has developed rapidly. Most of the online retailing or selling businesses are seeking for way for predicting their products demand. Sales forecasting may help retailers develop a sales strategy that will enhance sales and attract more money and investment. The current research work puts forward a machine learning framework to forecast E-commerce sales for strategic management using a dataset of E-commerce transactions. With 70 percent of the data for train and 30 percent for test, three models were produced, namely, Random Forest, Decision Tree, and XGBoost. In order to evaluate the models, performance measures inclusive of R-squared (R²) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) were employed. Thus, the XGBoost model was the most accurate in marketing predictive capabilities for E-commerce sales with the R² score of 96.3%. This has demonstrated the increased capability of XGBoost algorithm to forecast E-commerce monthly sales more accurately than other models and can assist decision makers for managing inventory and arriving smart and quick decisions in this rapidly growing E-commerce market. The findings reiterate the importance of using advanced analytics in order to drive effectiveness and customer experience within E-commerce sector.