WEBSELL: Intelligent Sales Assistants for the World Wide Web

Searching for and selecting complex products on the World-Wide-Web is a difficult task for consumers as well as for business professionals. The main reason for this well-known deficit in e-commerce is that, unlike normal business situations, there is no intelligent support or assistance for the user on the Web. This is particularly evident in the selection of products/services or when navigating through the complex space of available product information. Current product-oriented database search facilities are widely used on the Internet but recognised as limited in capability for sales support. In this paper we describe the objectives and achievements of WEBSELL an ESPRIT IV project (7/1998 1/2000) that set out to develop the next generation of intelligent sales support technology. WEBSELL draws on techniques from case-based reasoning, decision tree based protocol systems, user profiling and collaborative recommendation to produce virtual sales assistants that elicit users’ requirements and identify products or services to meet these requirements.