Design and Development of a Cooperative Shopping System with Shared Discussion Space Takayuki UMEDA Hiroyuki TARUMI Yahiko KAMBAYASHI Department of Social Informatics Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University Yoshida-Honmachi, Sakyo, Kyoto 606-8501, JAPAN h.tarumi@computer.org Abstract At current on-line shops, buyers almost independently enjoy shopping without anyone’s help. However, there are many cases where they cooperate with people such as per- sonal advisers or salespersons at real shops, especially at apparel shops. In the process of cooperation many evaluation data on candidate products are exchanged between buyers and per- sonal advisers. These evaluation data can be used for vari- ous services and marketing activities at the shop side. We propose a shared discussion space for cooperative users by sharing information on candidate products and evaluation data on them. The shared discussion space pro- vides a dynamic configuration mechanism from many view- points of criteria in order to help buyers to decide which item to buy. 1. Introduction With the increase of on-line customers of the Internet, sales of the on-line shopping market is now exploding. On- line shopping does not limit time and space for customers so that they can select products and pay money wherever and whenever they like. On-line shopping gives other benefits to customers that conventional retails and catalog shopping cannot offer. Currently the popular kinds of products sold on-line are computers and their peripherals, books, travels, compact discs, etc. Clothing has not been popular and were often re- garded as inappropriate products to on-line shopping. How- ever, in late 1998, it was reported that clothing is the most rapidly growing category of products sold on-line, and cus- tomers of catalog shopping would shift to the on-line mar- ket. currently, Keyence Corp. Clothing is different from books, computers, etc., be- cause customers have their own subjective standards to se- lect products. They often need help from their acquain- tances or salespersons to decide which product to take. We propose an environment for on-line customers to cooperate with each other to select products with a shared space where they can discuss on several items and compare them. This environment can also give benefits to shops by feeding back the behavior data of customers. In this paper, the authors describe a cooperative model on shopping activity based on a simple experiment and propose a user interface to facilitate evaluation of candidate products and reuse it. We also mention an implementation of this cooperative shopping system taking the case of neckties. 2. Analysis 2.1. Problems in on-line apparel shops We focus on the problems of user interfaces at on-line shops that cannot be solved only by improvements of the infrastructure of the Internet. The drawbacks of the user interface at current on-line apparel shops are described as follows. Products retrieval by keywords It is often very hard for general consumers to search their favorite products efficiently because they must know various technical terms about colors and patterns. It is also a serious problem that it is difficult for customers to find better products in retrieval results because they are just dis- played in the order of product ID. Inconvenience of virtual shopping carts A virtual shop- ping cart is an extension of conventional one provided at real shops. Customers can keep any product in it temporarily before purchasing. Almost all virtual