Forecasting of Chinese E-Commerce Sales: An Empirical Comparison of ARIMA, Nonlinear Autoregressive Neural Network, and a Combined ARIMA-NARNN Model

With the rapid development of e-commerce (EC) and shopping online, accurate and efficient forecasting of e-commerce sales (ECS) is very important for making strategies for purchasing and inventory of EC enterprises. Affected by many factors, ECS volume range varies greatly and has both linear and nonlinear characteristics. Three forecast models of ECS, autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), nonlinear autoregressive neural network (NARNN), and ARIMA-NARNN, are used to verify the forecasting efficiency of the methods. Several time series of ECS from China’s Jingdong Corporation are selected as experimental data. The result shows that the ARIMA-NARNN model is more effective than ARIMA and NARNN models in forecasting ECS. The analysis found that the ARIMA-NARNN model combines the linear fitting of ARIMA and the nonlinear mapping of NARNN, so it shows better prediction performance than the ARIMA and NARNN methods.