Intelligent Agents And Intelligent Interfaces In Ecommerce

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Electronic commerce is sharing business information, maintaining business relationships, and conducting business transactions by means of communication networks.

E-commerce includes the relationship between companies (business-to-business), between customers (customer-to-customer), as well as between companies and customers (business-to customer).

Business-to-business segment currently dominates the E-commerce while consumer oriented segment is significantly lagging behind and current estimates place it at less than 10 percent of the total volume, even though they are all experiencing an exponential growth.

To explore the functionality needed to participate in e-commerce, the three pillars of e-commerce that should be satisfied in a successful solution:

1. Electronic information,

2. Electronic relationships,

3. Electronic transactions.

The electronic information is, at least initially, the easy part. The Web is global repository of documents and other forms of multimedia, where everyone can be a publisher of information. From this entry point, however, things become more complicated. Existing information must be translated into appropriate formats for the Web. Catalogs are major endeavors, but catalog management can become quite complex, especially when catalogs are virtual, combining information from several sources into a consolidated catalog that can be extended, inspected, re sequenced, and subsisted.

To be successful in e-commerce, a company must build the central pillar, Electronic Relationships. The site must be innovative, it must add value, provide information and interaction not otherwise available. It must create forums for opinion-building activities. In short, the site must build community and become the "port of entry" for commerce.

A good community involves determination of customer interests, where two choices are available: having the customer fill out interest profile information or having the system analyze a user's activity trails through a web site (e.g., personalization, collaborative information filtering, analysis of consumer buying behavior, etc.).

The capability to handle Electronic Transactions is the third and least mature pillar of e-commerce. Perceived and real obstacles have to be overcome before electronic transactions become a widespread means of consummating binding contracts and making payments. The major barriers include security on the Internet, lack of accepted standards for authentication and payments, non-repudiation, and general fear and uncertainty by consumers.

The most highly touted applications of Ecommerce are consumer-oriented. They include activities related to buying and selling goods or services, banking, and stock brokerage, accompanied by on-line advertising. Limiting factor for lagging behind the other segments is the settlement phase of transacting on the Web. The consumer should be able to pay for a purchase on the Web easily and with a perception of security. Customer can also gain a lot from e-commerce such as investing little effort to find a product or service, the best (lowest) price, the latest updates etc.

Another advantage is that the stores on the Internet are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to allow customers to do business whenever they want. Not only customers gain advantages. Merchants are visible to a global market that represents a great potential, but on down side increases the competition that lowers the prices and profit. With automatic negotiation, merchants could use differential pricing, and products that used to be non-profitable could suddenly become profitable to sell. Lower prices and easier shopping could make customers buy more.

Here is a list of most visited e-commerce sites on the Internet:

· http://www.myntra.com/ - provides access to various items like clothes, shoes, accessories etc.

· http://www.flipkart.com - offers the biggest selection of books, mobiles, and more

· http://www.expedia.com - on-line travel agency

· http://www.ebay.com – offers almost everything imaginable and provides the facility to users to put up any item for bidding.

Intelligent Agents in Ecommerce

Description

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to play a significant role in many leading information systems. In the past, its use has been limited due to its complexity, monolithic designs and lack of knowledgeable system developers. AI contribution is now crucial in nondeterministic systems such as workflow, data mining, production scheduling, supply chain logistics, and most recently, ecommerce. Its new form is not the monolithic AI systems of the past, but distributed artificial intelligence, popularly known as intelligent agent technology. Intelligent agent technology is the next logical step in overcoming some shortcomings in e-commerce. Namely, successful computer systems underlying ecommerce require judgment and the knowledge of experts such as buyers, contract negotiators and marketing specialists.

Role of Intelligent Agents in Ecommerce

It is useful to explore the roles of agents as mediators in electronic commerce in the context of a common framework. The presented model stems from consumer buying behavior research and comprises the actions and decisions involved in buying and using goods and services. The model covers many areas, but focuses primarily on retail markets (although most concepts pertain to business-to-business and business-to-consumers markets as well). Also, electronic commerce covers a broad range of issues, some of which are beyond the scope of this consumer buying behavior model.

There are 5 fundamental stages of the buying process, which also elucidate where agent technologies apply to the shopping experience:

1. Identification:

This stage characterizes the buyer becoming aware of some unmet need by stimulating through product information. Agents can play an important role for those purchases that are repetitive (supplies) or predictable (habits). One of the oldest and simplest examples of software agents are so called "monitors": continuously running programs which monitor a set of sensors or data streams and take action when a certain pre-specified condition apply. There are many examples in abundant use, one very familiar is a "notification agent" called "Eyes" by Amazon.com, which monitors the catalog of books for sale and notifies the customer when certain events occur that may be of interest to the customer (e.g., when a new book in category X becomes available).

2. Brokering:

a) Product Brokering: Once a buyer has identified a need to make a purchase (possibly with the assistance of a monitor agent), the buyer has to determine what to buy through a critical evaluation of retrieved product information. There are several agents systems that lower consumers’ search cost when deciding which products best meet their needs ex: PersonaLogic, Firefly, and Tete-a-Tete. The result of this stage is a consideration set of goods.

b) Merchant Brokering: This stage combines the consideration set from the previous stage with merchant-specific alternatives to help determine who to buy from. The problem that was exposed here was that most of the merchants do not want to compete on price only, and want the value-added services (e.g., warranty, availability, delivery time, reputation) to be included in consumers’ buying decision.

3. Negotiation:

In this stage, price and other terms of the transaction are settled on. Real-world negotiation increases transaction costs that may be too high for either consumers or merchants. There are also impediments in the real world to using negotiation such as time constraints, frustrations, all parties to be geographically co-located etc., which mostly disappear in the digital world. The majority of business-to-business transactions involve negotiation. In retail, we are mostly familiar with fixed prices. The benefit of dynamically negotiating the price for a product instead of fixing it is that it relieves the merchant from needing to determine the value of the good a priori. Rather, this burden is pushed to the marketplace.

4. Payment and Delivery:

This stage can either signal the termination of the negotiation stage or occur sometimes afterwards (in either order). In some cases, the available payment or delivery options can influence product and merchant brokering.

5. Product Service and Evaluation:

This post-purchase stage involves product service, customer service, and an evaluation of the satisfaction of the overall buying experience and decision.

Given the above set of stages, we can identify the roles of agents as mediators in electronic commerce. The nature of agents makes them well-suited for mediating those consumer behaviors involving information filtering and retrieval, personalized evaluations, complex coordination, and time-based interactions. Those roles correspond most notably to the need identification, product and merchant brokering, and negotiation stages of the buying behavior model.

Agents are a key component in the Internet wide information and electronic commerce systems that are currently being developed across the globe. But it is not an easy task to predict how agents will develop into the future. There is still a long way before software agents transform how businesses conduct business. The greatest change will occur once standards are adopted and evolved to unambiguously and universally define goods and services, consumer and merchant profiles, value-added services, secure payment mechanisms, complex goals, changing environment, etc.

Looking even further in the future, the third generation of agents in electronic commerce system will explore new types of transactions in the form of dynamic relationships among previously unknown parties. That is the generation where companies will be at their most agile and marketplaces will approach perfect efficiency.

The ultimate test of agent's success will be the acceptance and (mass) usage by users.

The road to the success is most likely to be laid by developers, suppliers, and many commercial companies, who will join in, as there are many interesting opportunities for them. However, there are a few important points that need to be settled before this can really be done well. Solid standards need to be established such as common agent communication language, common marketplaces, etc.

Intelligent Interfaces

An interface provides a means of communication between two or more entities.

Interfaces exist between a user and a program. Specifically, a human- computer interface is the part of a computer system with which a person interacts to accomplish some task. It includes both the methods for allowing the user to perform actions, as well as the means by which the computer reports information to the user.

In intelligent interfaces, the intelligence might be in predicting what the user wants to do, and presenting information with this prediction in mind. Intelligent interfaces can also make doing a task more intuitive and helpful. Instead of trudging along a task in the mire of an inefficient and clumsy interface, the user might find a helpful and information-using interface to be more "intelligent." Thus, intelligence does not actually mean cognition in this context; instead, it means using information in an appropriate manner. 

The interface can be intelligent about a variety of things. One of these is system functionality. The interface might have some knowledge of how to get around the system, or tasks a user would want to do. With this information, the system can present its interface in an intelligent manner, making navigation and operation more intuitive to the user. 

Interfaces can be intelligent about the user. Through the use of a user model, the system can tailor communication (both input and output) to the user. Examples of tailored communications include methods of communicating (voice? visual? tactile?) and way of presenting data (bar graph? pie chart? line graph?). 

The interface can also be sensitive to the wants and needs of the user. This ties closely with the user model, but it deals more with interface adaptability than outright use of models. One scenario where interfaces might be able to detect the needs of the user would be in the case of a system detecting that the user needs help doing a particular task; the system might volunteer this help. Or, a system may notice that a user is having trouble with the interface; perhaps the system can alter its interface a bit to compensate (for example, maybe the user keeps selecting the wrong button; maybe an alteration to compensate would be to describe the button in more detail, or give more hints as to the correct button to press).

Role of Intelligent Interfaces in E-commerce

1. Identifying how customers make decisions helps in the design of the interface since it allows the designer to best visualize how the information is expected to be found on the screen. E-commerce is not simply concerned with technology but also encompasses results from consumer behavior. The interface must help the user recognize the need for the product or service that is being sold. The designer must also considered what level and amount of information is enough to make the users feel that they can make an inform choice. 

2. One of the most important aspects of the interface is to preserve the user satisfaction and making each user feel welcome and as eager as ever to purchase whatever you are selling. Obviously the audience is much more diverse on the web than during a face to face transaction, as such the interface has to be capable of accommodating this diversity efficiently.

3.  If the system is designed appropriately the consumer will be greeted with a friendly and personal hello followed by information that is focused on their preferences. This process of getting to know the customer is known as personalization and it is geared towards making the shopping experience a most pleasant one for each individual.

4. The emergence of intelligent interfaces conflicts with several principles of usability. Some of these principles include user control, making the system predictable, and making the system transparent to the user. If intelligent agents are going to be used to achieve personalization of the system, no assurance can be given to any of the principles mentioned as well as the effects these agents have on trust and privacy. The conflict arises as of which aspect of the design is going to result in a greater user satisfaction; evaluations must prove that using intelligent interfaces and their adaptive behavior does improve the interaction with the user.

Thus we can say that although it is still the dawn of intelligent agents and interfaces in E –commerce, both hold the key to a successful and prosperous future for E-commerce.