COSIMA B2B - Sales Automation for E-Procurement

6th IEEE Conference on E-Commerce Technology (CEC'04).
pp. 59-68, San Diego, CA, USA, July 2004.
ISBN: 0-7695-2098-7

Abstract: We present a fully automated electronic sales agent for e-procurement portals. The key technologies for this breakthrough are based on preferences modeled as strict partial orders, enabling a deep personalization of the B2B sales process. The interplay of several novel middleware components achieves to automate skills that so far could be executed only by a human vendor. As personalized search engine for XML based e-catalogs we use Preference XPath; the Preference Presenter implements a sales psychology based presentation of search results, supporting various human sales strategies; the Preference Repository provides the management of situated long-term preferences; the flexible Personalized Price Offer and the multi-objective Preference Bargainer provide a personalized price fixing and the opportunity to bargain about the price of an entire product bundle, applying up/cross and down selling techniques. Our prototype COSIMA^B2B, supported by industrial partners, has been successfully demonstrated at a large computer fair.