Design of a shopbot and recommender system for bundle purchases

The increasing proliferation of online shopping and purchasing has naturally led to a growth in the popularity of comparisonshopping search engines, popularly known as "shopbots". We extend the one-product-at-a-time search approach used in current shopbot implementations to consider purchasing plans for a bundle of items. Our approach leverages bundle-based pricing and promotional deals frequently offered by online merchants to extract substantial savings. Interestingly, our approach can also identify "freebies" that consumers can obtain at no extra cost. We also develop a model to extend the capability of the current recommendation algorithms that are mainly based on collaborative filtering and item-to-item similarity techniques, to incorporate product price and savings as an additional important factor in making recommendations to shoppers. We develop a practical algorithm that can be employed when the number of items is large or when the real-time nature of shop...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: DSS
• Authors: Robert S. Garfinkel, Ram D. Gopal, Arvind K. Tripathi, Fang Yin
• Keywords: Current Shopbot, Current Shopbot Implementations, DSS 2006, ShopBot