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Relax and keep ‘Eyes’
open for best deals
The buying agents automatically collect information about vendors and products that meet specific needs, evaluate the offerings, take decisions about the vendors and products to investigate, negotiate the terms of the transactions, place orders and make automated payments. Agent technology has not made great progress in the need identification stage and currently agents can only help in repetitive purchases. A notification agent called ‘Eyes’ at the Amazon.com site monitors a catalogue of books and notifies customers when books of their interest are available. Once the consumer need has been identified the process enters the product brokering stage. In this stage, several agents carry out critical evaluation of the product information and market recommendations to the customers. Firefly (www.firefly.com) is one such collaboration agent that makes recommendations based on group evaluation of products. The agent compiles the evaluation as well as profile of the evaluating users thereby recommending a product based on the preferences of people with similar profiles. Today several sites require their customers to manage their negotiation strategies on their own. It is here that the agents play a vital role in automating the process of negotiation. Kasbah (http://kasbah.media.mit.edu), for instance, is an electronic marketplace where agent programs carry out transaction with each other on behalf of the customer. These agents are proactive and once launched try to sell the goods in the market place by contacting other buying agents and negotiating the best deal with them. Bargainfinder (http://bf.cstar.ac.com/bf)
is another experimental virtual shopping agent for the Web. It queries
the price and availability of user specified music CDs. AuctionBOT is a
general purpose Internet auction server at the University of Michigan.
Here a seller can create new auctions to sell products by choosing from
a selection of auction types and then specifying its parameters.
AuctionBOT differs from most other auction sites on the fact that it
provides an API for users to create their own software agents to
automatically compete in the AuctionBOT marketplace. Such an API
provides a semantically sound |
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E-COMMERCE
is creating a vast market place with enormous number of products and
pricing options. Today, information about products and vendors is easily
available on the Web with orders and payments being automated. But there
are several stages in the buying process, like buying decisions, product
search, purchase, payment, price discovery etc., that are time
consuming. Intelligent agents when used in certain stages of these
processes can increase user-productivity by carrying out certain
programmable routine tasks in the background. This not only reduces the
transaction costs but also improves the entire experience for the buyer.