Intelligent Support for Online Sales : The WEBSELL Experience

Searching for and selecting complex products on the World-Wide-Web is a difficult task for consumers as well as for business professionals. The main reason for this well-known deficit in e-commerce is that, unlike normal business situations, there is no intelligent support or assistance for the user on the Web. This is particularly evident in the selection of products/services or when navigating through the complex space of available product information. Current product-oriented database search facilities are widely used on the Internet but offer limited sales support. In this paper we describe the WEBSELL project (7/1998 1/2000) that set out to develop the next generation of intelligent sales support technology. WEBSELL draws on techniques from case-based reasoning, decision tree based protocol systems, user profiling and collaborative recommendation to produce virtual sales assistants that elicit users’ requirements and identify products or services to meet these requirements.