Interface agents: caveat mercator in electronic commerce

Electronic commerce has opened new opportunities for buyers and sellers. Consumers can do things in an on-line environment that are simply not possible in face-to-face transactions. In this paper, we push this observation by examining and using a new type of software agent to convert merchant interfaces-into middleware thus enabling one to assess and optimize their interactions with all the computing support available in today's Decision Support System (DSS) environments. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.