An intelligent product-information presentation in E-commerce

Electronic commerce ( E-commerce) web-sites must be equipped with multimedia presentations for effective marketing of their products. Providing required product-information to a genuine buyer is a complex task in the present day web-based service environments. In this paper, we propose a distributed proxy based electronic shopping model, which is intelligent enough to study the customer behavior and plan the presentations accordingly by using a flexible multimedia synchronization model. The multimedia synchronization model is located at the proxy. The model triggers one of the three synchronization mechanisms, point, real-time continuous or adaptive synchronization based on the customer buying probability. The synchronization scheme employs a set of static and mobile agents: to estimate the network delays, to compute the skew, to monitor the loss and estimate the playout times of the presentation units of product-information. We simulated the electronic shopping model and the synchronization model to evaluate their operation effectiveness in several network scenarios. The benefits of scheme are: intelligent planning of product-information presentations, asynchronous delay estimation, flexibility and adaptability. (c) 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V.