Connecting your mobile shopping cart to the Internet-of-Things

Abstract

Online shopping has reached an unforeseen success during the last decade thanks to the explosion of the Internet and the development of dedicated websites. Nonetheless, the wide diversity of e-commerce websites does not really foster the sales, but rather leaves the customer in the middle of dense jungle. In particular, finding the best offer for a specific product might require to spend hours browsing the Internet without being sure of finding the best deal in the end. While some websites are providing comparators to help the customer in finding the best offer meeting her/his requirements, the objectivity of these websites remains questionable, the comparison criteria are statically defined, while the nature of products they support is restricted to specific categories (e.g., electronic devices). In this paper, we introduce Macchiato as a user-centered platform leveraging online shopping. Macchiato implements the principles of the Internet-of-Things by adopting the REST architectural style and semantic web standards to navigate product databases exposed on the Internet. By doing so, customers keep the control of their shopping process by selecting the stores and comparing the offers according to their own preferences. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.