Towards Building Loyalty in e-Commerce Applications: Addressing Issues on Personalisation, Persistence & Presentation

In the increasing trend towards e-commerce, vendor-purchaser relations have become de-personalised. Attempts to improve relations by introducing so-called loyalty schemes, which are in fact thinly disguised discount schemes, have failed to redress the balance. On-line, on-site kiosk-based multimedia systems in conjunction with reward schemes can engage the customer's interest but do not necessarily create loyalty. The EU MAPPA Project (EP28831) seeks to add value to such systems in order create loyalty: our means of achieving this is to use Agent technology and by addressing issues on Personalisation, Persistence, and Presentation (the 3Ps). This paper discusses the problems in creating loyalty in electronic commerce. We argue that it is necessary to address the 3Ps inorder to achieve loyalty: that is by understanding the potential value of the customer's IPR (the value of information, interaction, personalisation, privacy, (mutual) respect and re-use). In each case, we analyse the situation in conventional retailing, give guidelines on transferring the value to electronic commerce, and then discuss how the value is realised in the MAPPA system architecture and/or its agents