Electronic Shopping Through an Interactive Advertising and Browsing Banner

Advertising in TV broadcasting has shown that multimedia is a very effective means to present merchandise and attract shoppers. However, the use of interactive multimedia in shopping over the Internet has only begun to be explored. Especially the issues of coupling interactive browsing, shopping, and secure transactions from e.g. inside a multimedia banner, have not been discussed. In this paper, we address these issues by presenting an interactive multimedia shopping system and investigate the functional requirements of individual components in the system architecture. The system architecture consists of an interactive multimedia banner (such as a banner-ad, or the display of merchandise in a catalog), a browsing agent, and a transaction agent. Such interactive multimedia banners allow users to browse and buy the merchandise in the e-mall directly from the banner. The browsing agent enables interactive browsing within the banner. The transaction agent interfaces with various e-commerce servers and existing e-malls to complete the transaction securely. We implement a pure Java based shopping system to investigate the feasibility of this architecture. The initial implementation results indicate that this architecture provides a tight and general integration between multimedia browsing and secure transactions and significantly reduces user interactions needed to choose the merchandise and close the transaction.