A book edited by Dr. Yun Wan, University of Houston, Victoria
Web-based comparison-shopping services have grown into a mainstream business-to-consumer ecommerce category in the last 10 years. Leading comparison-shopping services like shopping.com, shopzilla.com, and pricegrabber.com are being used by an increasing number of Web shoppers, and these services now rank next to eBay and Amazon. Established online portals like MSN, Yahoo, and Google also have their own comparison-shopping services to accommodate online visitors. The study of comparison-shopping services, however, when compared with the study of online retailing and online auction, is rather limited, especially in regards to the design of these services and their impact on users.
For example, most existing academic research on the technical design of comparison-shopping has been on data wrapping and information retrieval; While in the industry, data-feeding has become standard practices for all major comparison-shopping services. For interface design, innovative comparison-shopping services are already spread from PC to mobile devices, and the information format has evolved from mere price comparison to product research. All these changes have not been closely followed by academic research. In summary, though comparison-shopping services have grown into a mature ecommerce sector, the research in this area has not passed the level of innovation. Thus, it is necessary for us to expand our understanding of this important ecommerce model and the technology infrastructure behind it. To help fill this void, Comparison-Shopping Sercies and Agent Desings will provide an up-to-date, comprehensive study of the research on comparison-shopping services.
This book will provide a comprehensive coverage of existing research on comparison-shopping services and the comparison-shopping agent design. The topics include but are not limited to: the business model of comparison-shopping, the vendor strategy of participating in comparison-shopping, consumer behavior when using comparison-shopping services, legal issues, and technical design and sophistication of the services, etc.
This book aims to provide:
a) A summary of existing research on comparison shopping
b) A cross-discipline overview and references for researchers and practitioners interested in this field
c) Innovative explorations of the current trend of comparison-shopping services
Studies on comparison-shopping have been conducted from marketing, psychology, economics, electronic commerce, human computer interaction, and intelligent agents, etc. It is beneficial to compare these findings and research models from different perspectives, synthesize them and boost the research in this field to a higher level. This book aims to lead the effort in this direction.
This book is targeting both academic researchers and industry practitioners. It is especially useful for those who seek an overview and reference to the field; and those interested in the discipline of Comparison-Shopping and its cross-disciplinary implications. Managers in Electronic Commerce would also find this book useful in terms of getting a broad view of search engine marketing beyond Search Engine Optimization.
Since this book is written for a general audience including both academia and industry, the topics of this book will cover four tracks: a business track addressing the various business models of comparison-shopping; a consumer behavior track covering the research on how consumers use comparison-shopping services, and a technical track covering the design of comparison-shopping services from the bottom-up. Research on policy and legal issues of comparison-shopping are included as the fourth track.
1. The Business Issues
2. The Consumer Behavior Issues
3. The Service Design and Technical Issues
4. Other important issues related to comparison-shopping, e.g. public policy and legal issues.
Full chapters are expected to be submitted by April 20, 2008. Authors are encouraged to contact the editor in advance for the potential chapter topic. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. The book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.), www.igi-global.com, publisher of the IGI Publishing, Information Science Publishing, IRM Press, CyberTech Publishing, Information Science Reference, and Medical Information Science Reference imprints.
Yun Wan
Assistant Professor of Computer Information System
Department of Computer Science
University of Houston, Victoria
14000 University Blvd
Sugar Land, TX 77479
Email: wany@uhv.edu
Telephone/Fax: 281-201-4223