InterShop: Enhancing the Vendor/Customer Dialectic in Electronic Shopping

Electronic shopping systems offer new horizons in vendor marketing, customer convenience, and overall market efficiencies. Information networks can gather thousands of vendors and millions of customers into an information-rich marketplace that serves both their perspectives. Unfortunately, existing electronic shopping systems provide a vendor/customer dialectic that offers low product differentiation and comparability. This limits market efficiency and results in negative experiences for both vendors and customers. We propose a functional architecture for a new generation of electronic shopping infrastructures to dramatically improve vendor representation and customers navigation. This design reshapes the vendor/customer dialectic by proving higher levels of both product differentiation and comparability. A prototype implementation of the architecture is described.