Product Evaluation Services for E-Commerce

Abstract

Despite the rapid growth of e-commerce and the hype surrounding it, the potential of the Internet for truly transforming commerce is largely unrealized to date is because most electronic purchases are still largely nonautomated. User presence is still required in all stages of the buying process. According to the nomenclature of Maes’ group in the MIT Media Labs (Guttman, 1999; Maes, 1994), the common commerce behavior can be described with consumer buying behavior (CBB) model, which consists of six stages, namely, need identification, product brokering, merchant brokering, negotiation, purchase and delivery, and product service and evaluation.