WEBSELL: Intelligent Sales Assistants for the World Wide Web

E-commerce offers many advantages and opportunities; however these benefits come at the cost of not having a human sales-person in the sales process. The sales-person facilitates the sales process by helping customers identify what their requirements are and then by identifying what products best meet these requirements. In the absence of this human support for the sales process in e-commerce there is a need to develop intelligent virtual sales agents that will fill these roles. This was the objective of the ESPRIT-IV project WEBSELL that completed in January 2000. The WEBSELL consortium includes four commercial companies (tec:inno GmbH, Germany, Adwired One to One Communication AG, Switzerland, IMS MAXIMS plc., Ireland, IWT Magazin Verlag GmbH, Germany) and two Universities (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and University of Kaiserslautern, Germany). WEBSELL has developed new intelligent sales support technology that supports Web shoppers in two aspects of the sales process which have been previously neglected: • helping the user identify and articulate their requirements and • identifying the products best suited to those requirements.