The Shopping Gate - Enabling Role- and Preference-Specific E-commerce Shopping Experiences

Customer relationship management, one-to-one marketing, recommendation systems, and real-time click mining are common means to create a personalised customer interaction in today’s e-Commerce. However, one major aspect of customisation and adaptation has thus far been neglected – one buyer might assume multiple shopping roles. Searching for a present for an 11-yearold daughter leads to a different preference profile than evaluating workstations for the purchasing department. This paper proposes the shopping gate – a site on the Internet where buyers can create and maintain different roles with specific preference profiles. Before going on an electronic shopping trip, a buyer can pass the shopping gate, choose the appropriate role and take the corresponding preference profile along to the merchants ‘on the way’, thus entering these shops with a role-specific ‘skin’. Our prototype implementation of the shopping gate server, role representation, and protocol is based on open standards such as the platform for privacy preferences (P3P) and XML Schema.