Software Agents in E-Commerce Systems

The Internet introduces a new global marketplace for a large number of relatively unknown and often small companies often offering substitutive or complimentary products and services. The merchants profit from reduced costs, reduced time, and unsold stocks. Customers are attracted by increasing convenience and fast fulfillment. Merchants offering these products and services on this new marketplace need to acquire new customers and sustain ongoing relationships. Nowadays, most merchants’ sites are passive catalogs of products and prices with mechanisms for orders (Dasgupta et al., 1998). The pull strategy is also applied in auctions available over the Internet, where the seller waits passively for bids. The new push technologies for electronic commerce, like software agents, enable customers to compare a bewildering array of products efficiently, effectively, and automatically (Jennings et al., 1998). Switching costs for customers and, thereby, their loyalty to previous suppliers in the marketplace decline. Using the Internet, the producers profit from reduced cost through direct, non-intermediated sales. The key elements to successful long-term relationships between merchants and customers will be the offering of personalized and valueadded services, like one-to-one marketing services, discounts, guarantees, and savings coupons (Seitz et al., 2002, p. 209). In this article, we will analyze possible consequences of new push and pull technologies in electronic commerce for customers’ loyalty. The active technologies enable customers to purchase efficiently and the merchants to offer highly personalized, value added, and complimentary products and services. We will discuss some examples of such services and personalization techniques sustaining one-to-one relationships with customers and other actors involved.