An integration of expert systems and multi-agent technologies in online shopping

Abstract

Online shopping is a practice of e-commerce which permits customers to directly buy goods and services from the supplier over the Internet. It has revolutionized the business over the years by making anything available at anytime from anywhere in a single mouse click. Due to the uncertainty of the customers, online shopping is not popular among the wood based furniture industry. Hence, the wood based furniture industry is limited to a small market space. The customers should search from store to store for a particular piece of furniture, because the customers do not have the facility to compare the prices as in online shopping. Therefore, this paper aims to provide a new experience for online shopping of the wood based furniture industry with the use of recent advancements in the Artificial Intelligence field such as Expert System and Multi-agents. The expert system captures the customer requirements using a simple application form and predicts the appropriate furniture that matches with the customer requirements based on the knowledge of the experts. It presents the prediction with references in order to shape the trust of the customers. The multi-agent approach is involved in the bidding process. The proposed solution will fulfil the customer expectations in online shopping of furniture industry by eliminating the uncertainty of the customers. More importantly, it models the customer satisfaction that leads to gain the customer loyalty which will be a great competitive advantage in the industry.