Agent Technology for e-Commerce Chapter 4: Shopping Agents Maria Fasli

Chapter 4 Agent Technology for e-Commerce 2 Consumer Buying Behaviour Model  Consumer Buying Behaviour (CBB) theory provides a model that describes the actions and decisions involved in buying and selling goods and services  Most CBB models involve six stages:  Need recognition  Product brokering  Merchant brokering  Negotiation  Purchase and delivery  Service and evaluation  Agent technology can be potentially used in every stage

Chapter 4 Agent Technology for e-Commerce 3 Online shopping: The problem  Consumers’ attitudes towards online shopping have changed  To search for a product, a consumer can:  Visit specific vendors’ sites that she is aware of  Use standard search engines and keyword retrieval to identify potential vendors and products  In each site visited the consumer can search for a product, its price, specification and other attributes

Chapter 4 Agent Technology for e-Commerce 4 This approach has several shortcomings:  There may be hundreds of vendors selling the same or similar products – checking vendors requires time  Returned results through standard search technology may be biased  If more than one products are required there may be no single site that caters for all  When visiting a new vendor, the consumer needs to get acquainted with new interfaces: time-consuming and also hinders impulse shopping

Chapter 4 Agent Technology for e-Commerce 5  Vendors may allow users to sign up to receive alerts  Completing lengthy forms may be required which may also require the user to provide personal information – the user’s privacy is weakened  Such services are impersonal

Chapter 4 Agent Technology for e-Commerce 6 Using shopping agents  Users have more choice, but there are too many choices; information overload  Shopping agents or shopbots can enhance the users’ shopping experience by:  Helping them decide what to buy  Finding specifications and reviews for products  Comparing products, vendors and services according to user- defined criteria  Finding the best value products and services  Monitoring online shops for product availability, special offers and discounts and sending alerts

Chapter 4 Agent Technology for e-Commerce 7 Potential benefits For the individual user  Time savings  More vendors can be queried and better deals can be uncovered  User can have access to smaller vendors  Help them make educated decisions  Psychological burden-shifting

Chapter 4 Agent Technology for e-Commerce 8 For the marketplace  Shopping agents and reputation systems can help tackle fraud  Increased competition  Market efficiency  Smaller vendors can be visible Shopping agents can be used not only on retail markets, but also on business-to-business (B2B) markets

Chapter 4 Agent Technology for e-Commerce 9 Working for the user To be truly useful and work for the user they have to:  Be impartial i.e. provide unbiased information to the user  Be autonomous, proactively seek to help the user for instance by checking for products etc.  Preserve privacy when required, the user’s identity may have to be concealed to preserve her privacy  Offer personalized services to the user  Make comparisons based on multiple attributes

Chapter 4 Agent Technology for e-Commerce 10 How shopping agents work

Chapter 4 Agent Technology for e-Commerce 11  Similarly to meta-search engines: ‘screen-scraping’  They parse HTML pages and look for specific information  They rely on regularities in the layout of web pages  Navigation regularity  Uniformity regularity  Vertical separation regularity

Chapter 4 Agent Technology for e-Commerce 12 Limitations and issues Current techniques for extracting information rely on syntax:  Although the information required is stored in machine- processable and well-structured format, agent developers have no access to this information  Heuristics are ad-hoc, difficult and time-consuming to develop and prone to errors  The resulting systems are cumbersome and vendor specific  New vendors cannot be discovered and queried at runtime  Only able to retrieve limited information and comparisons are usually made on price alone – vendors vendors do not like that, other attributes may be important (guarantee, service etc.)  The information retrieved may be inaccurate

Chapter 4 Agent Technology for e-Commerce 13  Shopping agents make commissions in three ways (i)For each hit made to the vendors site (ii)For sales that result from clickthrough purchases (iii)For a favourable placement on the shopping agent’s recommended lists  Recommendation offered may therefore be biased  There may be discrepancies between reported and listed prices due to commissions  Such shopping agents may create the false impression that the best deal has been found

Chapter 4 Agent Technology for e-Commerce 14 From the vendors’ perspective  Although shopping agents improve their visibility, they also put their products next to those of competitors  To be competitive a vendor may have to reduce its profit margins

Chapter 4 Agent Technology for e-Commerce 15 Shopping agents and Web services Web services can be used as gateways to the vendors’ web sites