Including Marketing Strategies in the Electronic Commerce Framework

B2C electronic commerce is commonly viewed as a straightforward browsing and purchase process. Current search tools assisting shoppers limit the automatic comparison of products to the price of goods. Allowing merchants to successfully employ differentiation strategies online requires providing the web with semantic content that can represent merchants’ offers and be automatically processed by user-delegated software agents. In this paper we explore what we believe would be a positive evolution of agent-based electronic commerce, justifying the need for “second generation bots” that enable the utilization of different seller-side marketing strategies. We take a dynamic posted offering approach as opposed to a single negotiation-based approach. We present our seller agent architecture in such a scenario, including market analysis skills for insightful offer generation, implementing marketing strategies according to its configurable degree of autonomy. We expose some of our research concerns with the purpose of making such a model feasible.