Developing a Software Agent for Establishing a Convenient Customer-Driven Group-Buying Mechanism

Introduction

The characteristics of e-commerce are different with various trading objects or applications. E-commerce can be classified into business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business-to-customer (B2B2C), consumer-to-consumer (C2C), peer-to-peer (P2P), mobile commerce, intra-organizational, business-to-employee (B2E), collaborative commerce, non-profit-making, digital learning, exchange-to-exchange (E2E), and e-government categories. According to Zwass’s opinions (Zwass, 2003), e-commerce comprises five respects including commerce, collaboration, communication, connection, and computation. These respects can be exploited to find innovational opportunities to organize and address marketplaces, to offer innovative products, to collaborate with business partners, to transform business processes, and to organize the delivery of information-system services. If the five innovational opportunities are mapped to these categories, then a matrix showing the innovational opportunities in these e-commerce categories can be constructed as shown in Table 1. This study is focused on group-buying (or volume discount, aggregate sell/buy, buyer coalition, etc.), which belongs to both “organize and address marketplaces” and C2B EC. The concept of group-buying is that buyers can advantageously negotiate with sellers and purchase items at volume-discount prices by forming a coalition (Yamamoto & Sycara, 2001). Group-buying is also considered as a special type of reverse auction. For group-buying, an electronic market place usually a server computer) is a more convenient place than a traditional market, because it is very difficult to find a certain group of people with the same demand latter (Yuan & Lin, 2004).