User-friendly Product Selection

Abstract

User-friendliness is one of the key factors for successful e-commerce applications in the B2C domain. But today‟s online shops often provide highly technical product details impeding the product selection activities, especially for inexperienced consumers. As a consequence a knowledge gap between the potential customer‟s knowledge and the content of the product catalog exists. This thesis presents a collaborative approach which has the goal to improve the product selection process of online shops by the consumers themselves. This is achieved by applying collaborative Web 2.0 techniques in order to allow domain experts to gradually enter user-centered knowledge into a knowledge base. This knowledge is entered in a predefined structured form to enhance the existing product catalog and consequently to improve the product selection functionalities of the product catalog of an online shop. The target is to integrate these contribution mechanisms and the resulting improvement effects of the entered knowledge directly into the existing product selection process. Motivations for experts, which are typically consumers of the shop themselves, are open product selection issues entered by inexperienced consumers having problems during product selection. An eligible example is the search for a music player with a predefined amount of storage space. An inexperienced consumer, so called novice, must have the possibility to search for a player characterized by a maximum storable number of songs instead of searching for a player with a particular amount of gigabytes. If this search functionality is not available the novice consumer can open a product selection issue. Once this issue is solved by a domain expert by entering the missing knowledge, the system provides this desired search functionality so that it is able to handle the search for number of songs....