Persuasive online-selling in quality & taste domains

’Quality & taste’ products like wine or fine cigars are one of the fastest growing product sectors in e-commerce. Online shops for these types of products require on the one side persuasive Web presentation and on the other side deep product knowledge. In that context recommender applications may help to create an enjoyable shopping experience for online users. The Advisor Suite framework is a knowledge-based conversational recommender system that aims at mediating between requirements and desires of online shoppers and technical characteristics of the product domain. In this paper we present a conceptual scheme to classify the driving factors for creating a persuasive online shopping experience with recommender systems. We discuss these concepts on the basis of several fielded applications. Furthermore, we give qualitative results from a long-term evaluation in the domain of Cuban cigars.