WCSE

A Web Application for the Collection and Comparison of E-Shop Product Data

Abstract— E-commerce is a highly competitive and constantly growing market. On-line retailers need to compare their product offers with those of their competitors in order to remain competitive. Due to the large range of product offers on the Web and the fact that internet prices are adjusted on a daily basis or even more frequently the manual comparison of on-line product offers is a very time consuming task. Therefore, on-line retailers prefer the use of automated tools for performing that work. There are many existing ready-to-use software tools and on-line services from price comparison websites to market intelligence tools, but those tools still require a greater effort for the configuration of the tool or the comparison of the offers. The contribution of this paper is a Web application to automatically identify, extract and compare the product offers of the own e-shop with those of defined competitors. The specialties of the presented Web application are its degree of automation and the little effort for configuration.

Index Terms— web mining, web data extraction, e-commerce.

Andrea Horch, Holger Kett, Anette Weisbecker
Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO, GERMANY

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Cite: Andrea Horch, Holger Kett, Anette Weisbecker, "A Web Application for the Collection and Comparison of E-Shop Product Data," Proceedings of 2016 6th International Workshop on Computer Science and Engineering, pp. 167-179, Tokyo, 17-19 June, 2016.