Web Mining

The ease and speed with which business transactions can be carried out over the Web has been a key driving force in the rapid growth of electronic commerce. In addition, customer interactions, including personalized content, e-mail campaigns, online customer service, and online surveys provide new channels of communication that were not previously available or were very inefficient. The Web is revolutionizing the way businesses interact with each other (B2B) and with each customer (B2C). It has introduced entirely new ways of doing commerce, including auctions and reverse auctions, micro-segmented offers, dynamic pricing, and up-to-date content. It also made it imperative for organizations and companies to optimize their electronic business. Knowledge about the customer is fundamental for the establishment of viable e-commerce solutions. As described by Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, and mentioned by Joseph Pine in his book The Experience Economy (Pine et al.), customer experience is the key to building customer loyalty in an on-line store because leaving the store is only one click away. Web mining for e-commerce is the application of mining techniques to acquire this knowledge for improving e-commerce. The use of mining techniques in e-commerce can help improve cross-sells, up-sells, assortments shown, ads shown. In addition, clickstream collection allows for unprecedented measurement of site activities, conversion rates, and the effect of action (Kohavi, 2001). WEBKDD 2000 was the second workshop, 1 held in conjunction with the Sixth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), dedicated to the challenges of web mining. In response to call for papers, WEBKDD 2000