Classification of Shopping Information Services on the Web in Korea

국내의 웹 상의 쇼핑 정보 서비스 분류

In this paper, we review and classify shopping information services for electronic commerce in Korea. Shopping information services for electronic commerce can be divided into shopping mall information service and product information service. Shopping mall information service simply shows and suggests information on the shopping malls that it has in its data store. But product information service provides information about the items of the shopping malls the service has and therefore gives more powerful and convenient interfaces to users. Cutting-edge product information services can perform online comparison shopping facility, which searches and compares the items what the users want on the reasonable basis of economical criteria, such as price. Books, CDs, and Personal Data Assistant(PDA)s are the products of which the specification is clear enough to be described on the Web. And the comparison of the products by the information service is performed on the basis of "price" of the product item. The approach to design and implement product information service can be divided into two categories. The one is an application of data warehousing mechanism, which stores the product information on the regular basis of time and provide it when the users query over the Web-database gateway. The other approach is a shopping agent mechanism, which stores information on "how to shop" and the shopping agent collects the information of product items just after users query about the product and provide the information in real time or notify them by alerting service. Thirty nine shopping information services are compared and classified in this paper and they are extracted from "Naver" and "Yahoo! Korea". The final result shows that most services are just a simple shopping mall information service in growing stage, product information services with data warehousing are lack in product ontology in middle stage, and that product information services with shopping agent are in early stage.