Search mechanism for overcoming the suplicated product searches done in multiple e-commerce systems

Abstract

Along with the fast improvement of computer science, the businesses took different aspects to enhance their customer experience. As a result most of the small to large scale businesses are now using INTERNET to distribute their goods and services among the customers. This mechanism is widely known as e-Commerce or electronic commerce, which is a proven way of increasing the business revenue alongside by providing excellent services to their consumers. With the high demand of e-Commerce mechanisms used, customers are expecting more and more optimized service from their vendors. As the customers are more keen about their purchases, they tend to do the same search in different e-Commerce web portals to get the best out of each. But this may cause unnecessary time,effort and cost consuming for the customer as well as the vendor. Since the same customer do the same search in different web portals to figure out the best fit for his requirement there is a need for an alternative mechanism. This research discuss about this duplicated searches done by customers and suggests a better alternative to avoid it via an API mechanism. Also this problem of duplicated searches has verified by going through the evolution of e-Commerce via past researches and by examining the responses gathered from a sample set of individuals.The survey run among set of individuals highlights that due to reasons such as lack of alternative method, time consumption and filtration issues etc., people are expecting an alternative. The research has mainly focused on how to provide a single search methodology which returns the relevant results from a collection of existing e-Commerce web portals who provide APIs. The prototype proof of concept was built as a web based system by using technologies like PHP, HTML, CSS, jQuery and XML. It avoids the duplicated individual searches done by users in provided sample sites which are “eBay”, “BestBuy” and “FlipCart”. Other than this it allows to filter all three site’s results at once and meanwhile the logged in users gain more advantages such as viewing their past favours and historical information, last viewed products etc. This research is open for further investigation on combining the results from e-Commerce web portals which does not support any API. Through showing that the existing e-Commerce search mechanism consists of many defects, this research highlights the importance of a combined search engine which avoid duplicated searches done by customers in individual websites.