Electronic Commerce: The End of the Beginning

Customers of electronic shops find more and more support for the search and selection of products in the sales systems. Unfortunately, most of the shops do not provide additional support with parameterizable or configurable products. Such products could be further customized. One of the major problems most customization techniques suffer from is that they require large knowledge acquisition effort, which leads to problems in the rapidly changing e-Commerce scenario. In this paper, we present a new approach to customization that is particularly suited to e-Commerce applications. It assumes that products can be structured hierarchically into subcomponents. Customization is achieved by incrementally replacing unsuitable sub-components through recursively finding best-matching alternative sub-components, using Case-Based Reasoning technology for this search process. The presented approach avoids huge portions of the knowledge acquisition effort. The approach is implemented as a prototypical system.