Intelligent Support for Online Sales: The WEBSELL Experience Pádraig Cunningham Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. Padraig.Cunningham@tcd.ie .Sean Breen IMS Maxims, Dublin, Ireland. Ralph Traphöner Tec:inno, Kaiserslautern, Germany Ralph Bergmann, Sascha Schmitt University of Kaiserslautern, Germany {bergmann,sschmitt}@informatik.uni-kl.de Barry Smyth Changing Worlds Ltd., Dublin, Ireland and University College Dublin, Ireland Abstract Searching for and selecting complex products on the World-Wide-Web is a difficult task for consumers as well as for business professionals. The main reason for this well-known deficit in e-commerce is that, unlike normal business situations, there is no intelligent support or assistance for the user on the Web. This is particularly evident in the selection of products/services or when navigating through the complex space of available product information. Current product-oriented database search facilities are widely used on the Internet but offer limited sales support. In this paper we describe the WEBSELL project (7/1998 - 1/2000) that set out to develop the next generation of intelligent sales support technology. WEBSELL draws on techniques from case-based reasoning, decision tree based protocol systems, user profiling and collaborative recommendation to produce virtual sales assistants that elicit users’ requirements and identify products or services to meet these requirements. Introduction 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 and two Universities from Germany, Switzerland, and Ireland. WEBSELL has developed new intelligent sales support technology that supports Web shoppers in two aspects of the sales process which have been previously neglected: _____________ Copyright © 2001 Pádraig Cunningham, Ralph Bergmann, Sascha Schmitt, Ralph Traphöner, Sean Breen, Barry Smyth. • helping the user identify and articulate their requirements and • identifying the products best suited to those requirements. To enable maximum flexibility, the WEBSELL software has been designed as a modular architecture (see Figure 1) that includes components for: • representation of product data and knowledge, • dialogue with the customer (Pathways), • product search through case-based retrieval, • personalization and collaborative recommendation, • product presentation, • product customisation. Knowledge Repository Product Database XML communication framework WEBSELL SERVER Registration Dialogue Customisation Presentation UI Client Components Product Models & Preferences Profiles Customisation Operators Pathway Collaborative Recommendation Case-Based Retrieval Customisation Product Presentation Pathways Server XML Fig. 1. A functional view of the WEBSELL components. These components communicate with each other through specialised XML-based protocols and can be combined in a flexible manner. The different components draw on techniques from case-based reasoning, decision tree based