The shopping agent is still relatively new, and there is also significant scope for its further development through the development of its intelligent agent functions. Future agents will automatically build models of shoppers, recommend products to shoppers, negotiate on behalf of shoppers, and personalize the shopping experience.
MySimon is an intelligent agent that can imitate human navigational behavior and can be taught to shop at thousands of merchants in hundreds of product categories. Tete-a-tete is a project within the MIT Media Lab’s Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce initiative. It engages consumer-owned shopping agents and merchant-owned sales agents in integrative negotiations over the full value of each product offering (Guttman and Maes, 1998). These intelligent agent functions take the concept of the shopping agent beyond that of a purpose-built search engine. The future agents will reside on individual computers, create personal accounts for the owners, learn about their owners’ shopping preferences, create a personalized, or individualized “virtual store” and perform more efficient inquiries and purchases in subsequent requests.
Much of the relationship between retailers and customers in the future may be conducted via handheld mobile devices such as palm computers and cellular phones. PDAs already are combined with mobile phones from which users can log onto the Internet. Mobile agents are well suited for e-commerce since a commercial transaction may require real-time access to remote resources. Lang and Oshima (1999) specified seven main benefits for using mobile agents. They reduce the network load, overcome network latency, encapsulate protocols, execute processes asynchronously and automatically, react autonomously to changes, provide optimal conditions for seamless system integration, and are robust and fault-tolerant. Therefore, the design and development of the future shopping agent Web sites should suit the need of m-commerce.