ABSTRACT
This paper is motivated by the objective to reduce the gap between e-marketing strategies and agent technology by presenting a research framework to design an intelligent shopping agent’s knowledge base. Three hypotheses are tested in this paper: (1) e-marketing terms are important in influencing shoppers’ decisions to choose an online shop, (2) different shoppers have different shopping styles and these are influenced by e-marketing terms, (3) shoppers behave differently with respect to different types of products. The research framework is two folds, considering on one hand the e-marketing strategies used by vendor, and on the other hand shopper’s decision-making style. The experimental results show that shoppers perceive the e-marketing terms identified in this paper to be determinant when shopping online. In addition, the styles of shoppers are significant in indicating shoppers’ differences in decision making when choosing an online shop. According to their style, different shoppers perceive marketing terms in a different way. The solution proposed to support intelligent shopping agents to mimic shoppers’ decision style when faced to e-marketing strategies focuses on the creation of a knowledge base composed of (1) an ontology of e-marketing terms and (2) a number of decision-making rules for each different shopping style.
