Intelligent E-Commerce Agents
Partners or Predators?
Paper by Christian Wagner
and Efraim Turban
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(c) Dave Arnold 2004
Contents
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Agents the good
Agents the bad
Harvesting agents (data extraction agents)
Business models
Case Study (eBay)
How do harvesting agents affect the
business models?
(C) Dave Arnold 2004
Agents the good….
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Transaction Costs
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Can handle negotiations, and information
searches.
Email handling (Dell, etc)
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Firepond’s email agent can handle up to 80% of
customer emails with an 98% accuracy rate.
Order configuration, status, etc (Cisco)
(C) Dave Arnold 2004
Agents the good….part 2
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Turnaround time
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Instant response required for some events
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Closing the deal
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Stock
Commodities with altering prices
Internet sites are open 24/7
Lowest price purchase
(C) Dave Arnold 2004
Agents the bad…
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Stealing data
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Abusing resources
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Agents are supposed to acquire data, but what
about other resources?
Unauthorized program execution
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An agent may try to access data they are not
supposed to.
Trojan horse
(C) Dave Arnold 2004
Agents the bad…part 2
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Data stripping
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Resource exhaustion
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DoS attacks
Deceitful agent behavior
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Competitors may get data from an agent…
Mislead other agents and hosts
(C) Dave Arnold 2004
Harvesting Agents
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Specialized agents who access a target
website, sift through data and then send the
data to a third-party website to post the data.
These third-party websites are called
“aggregators”
Aggregator - A business which assembles a
collection of content from various publishers
under one banner
(C) Dave Arnold 2004
Case Study
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eBay modified its user agreement to not
allow such agents to access the site.
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Reasons
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Agents slow down the transaction systems
Might not show up to date information
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May reduce the “brand power”
(C) Dave Arnold 2004
Case Study…part 2
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Arguments
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The replication of the data will actually reduce the
traffic on eBay’s site.
eBay wouldn’t loose any business because all
transactions would still take place on eBay’s site.
Let’s look at the more generic models…
(C) Dave Arnold 2004
Internet Business Models
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Type of
business Model
Typical product
or service
offering
Revenue
generation
model
Performance
measures
Examples
Internet Service
Providers
Access to the
Internet, domain
hosting, email, etc,
Subscription fee
Number of
subscribers, time
spent connected,
services used.
MSN, AOL
E-shop
A product or service
that can be
purchased, obtained
or consumed over
the Internet
Service or product
offered at a profit
Number of
customers
eBay, Amazon,
E*Trade, etc.
E-free provider
An informal service
that can be obtained
for free by
customers
Advertising,
marketing research
Number of unique
visitors, number of
page hits, etc.
Geocities, iVillage,
Ask Jeeves, Ruby
Lane
(C) Dave Arnold 2004
How do these agents affect the
business models?
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Internet Service Providers
(C) Dave Arnold 2004
How do these agents affect the
business models?
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E-Shop
(C) Dave Arnold 2004
How do these agents affect the
business models?
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13
E-free provider
(C) Dave Arnold 2004