Aiding Purchase Decisions on the Internet

Internet-mediated dialogs between sellers and buyers have disadvantages relative to speaking with human purchase advisors or sales agents. Yet the Internet also offers the advantages of enormous knowledge resources, convenience, unbiased information, search agents, and currency. Principles for creating successful conversations with buyers are presented, and a purchase aiding system under development is described. 3 The Internet is a new channel of communication between buyers and sellers. From the buyer's perspective, there are both reasons to use the Internet and also reasons to prefer current alternatives for making purchases [1]. Before contrasting the Internet and other purchase/sales channels, the discussion is restricted in two ways. First, the focus is only on the purchase of complex products like automobiles, personal computers (PCs), and configurable industrial products. Second, buyers who know in advance the exact product that they wish to buy are excluded. That is, the focus is on buyers who need advice, not on the best way to place an order. The overarching question is: When is executing a complex purchase better done via the Internet alone versus some other commercial channel or combination of channels? The essence of this question, however, is revealed by the second restriction immediately above, namely focusing on advice rather than ordering. Thus, the topic of the present work is not the Internet versus alternative channels for locating and ordering a preselected product, as important as this contrast may be. Instead, the Internet is compared to other communication channels for obtaining the advice necessary to decide which product is the best one to buy. Maybe the most obvious competitor to the Internet is a human sales agent. However, a less readily available possibility should be recognized, advice from an independent source. This advice can then be executed through any channel that accepts an order for the selected product, including the Internet. Because an independent person, a " third party " , has the obvious advantage over a sales representative of no profit-induced bias, such a knowledgeable, unbiased, and cooperative person will be taken as the strongest competitor to the Internet as a source of purchase advice. Although this advice may derive either from an interaction with a human or from a non-customized resource like Consumer Reports magazine, human advisors offer more intelligence and customization. Further, they can access magazine reports and other non-4 customized sources of information. Thus, the human software advisor is adopted as the …