A buyer behaviour framework for the development and design of software agents in ecommerce

Software agents are computer programs that run in the background and perform tasks autonomously as delegated by the user. Although there has been much research on this topic recently, usable software agents are at an early stage of development, and are only now starting to appear in real applications. Typical of these early stages, there has been a technology focus, rather than a product focus, in much of the development work to date. A fruitful application area for software agents is in the area of ecommerce, where potential buyers can easily be overwhelmed by the flood of information that is available, thus potentially making less than optimal purchasing decisions. This paper blends models from marketing and learnings from the field of decision support systems to build a framework for the design of software agents to support in ecommerce buying applications.