Selling products or services online plays an important role in the success of businesses that have a physical presence, like a retail business. For many businesses, a retail website is an effective line of communication between the businesses and their customers. Even if the business does not present all of its products and services in the website, the website may be just what the customer needs to see to choose it over a competitor. Therefore, it is important to have a successful website to serve as a sales and marketing tool to participate in meeting the core requirements of the business. Clustering and classification are two important data mining techniques that are widely used to assign customers to different categories. Those categories are used to analyze customer behavior and interestingness. In this chapter, we use clustering and classification to support web designers to have better designed retail websites. This is done during the design phase by improving the structure of the website depending on the extracted patterns in a way that makes it easy for the website’s navigator to find his target products in an efficient time, give him the opportunity to have a look at some products that may be of interest for him, and encourage him to buy more from the available products which will consequently increase the business‘s overall profit. This approach will open the eyes of business leaders to adapt new efficient technological tool that when invested in their organizations will improve the strategic goals and meet their basic requirements to be successful, productive, and competitive. The experimental work shows very promising results that can positively change the traditional techniques of the process of designing retail websites.
TopIntroduction
Recently, the web is becoming an important part of
people’s life. The web allows people to easily
communicate and exchange ideas and views about any subject anywhere
in the world. The web is a very good place to run successful
businesses. Almost everything can be bought from online stores
without the need to go to physical shops. In e-commerce, instead of
having your business in a limited physical place and being limited
to a sector of customers who are usually near to your store or
business, you have it in the web. In e-commerce websites, you have
the ability to sell, advertise, and introduce different kinds of
services and products in the web. E-commerce websites have the
advantage of reaching a large number of customers regardless of
distance and time limitations. Furthermore, an advantage of
e-commerce over traditional businesses is the faster speed and the
lower expenses for both e-commerce website owners and customers in
completing customers' transactions and orders. Creating a
successful online business can be a very difficult and costly task
if not taking into account e-commerce website design principles, web
engineering techniques, and what e-commerce is supposed to do for
the online business. Understanding the requirements of both
e-commerce website owner and customer is an important aspect in
building a successful e-commerce website. A successful website is a
well-structured website. The website is well-structured from the
user’s point of view if it contains services that satisfy
user’s needs, if the user navigation is simplified, and
if he can reach his target page in a short time without the need to
make any search or to guess where his target page could be found.
The authors in Ranganathan et al.
(2002)
found that information content, design,
security, and privacy have an impact
on the effectiveness of a website as well as on the online purchase
intent of customers. Security and
privacy were found to have greater effect on
the purchase intent of customers.
On the other hand, from the point of view of the website owner, a
website is well-structured if it participates in increasing the
business overall profit, if it increases the user’s trust
in the business and its products, and participates in supporting the
business marketing strategies. Therefore, it is important to develop
and use tools that can guarantee to a high degree the quality of
websites to meet the requirements of both website owners and
users.