Analytical Product Selection Using a Highly-Dense Interface for Online Product Catalogs

One of the key elements of e-commerce systems is the online product catalog. It provides sellers with a content management system that assembles, aggregates, normalizes, and distributes product information. It also provides potential buyers with an interactive interface that offers a multimedia representation of the product information as well as retrieval, classification and ordering services. In this paper, we discuss the interface of online product catalogs, focusing on its ability to help shoppers navigate and analyze product information. Specifically, we present a new interactive interface for online product catalogs that is effective in navigating through the product information space and analytically selecting suitable products. It uses a multi-dimensional visualization mechanism based on parallel coordinates and augmented by a number of visual facilities for filtering, tagging, color-coding, and dynamic querying. To demonstrate the capabilities of the product catalog interface for online retail stores and marketplaces, we implement a prototype displaying a set of automobile data. We explain how the prototype visualizes the entire product information space in a single page and supports intuitive exploratory analysis with the visual facilities.