Recommending Products and Services Belonging to Online Businesses Using Intelligent Agents

A sure method for a business organization to sell more products is to expand its customer base and to have its products recommended by other organizations and individuals. This paper takes a look at the techniques used by shopping websites in order to entice the user in purchasing their products, and proposes a system for recommending products and services provided by different online businesses to potential customers. The solution is built upon a service-oriented architecture that allows businesses to share information regarding customers' purchases while taking into account the user privacy issue. Intelligent agents, which rely on a product type association dynamically weighted graph, are employed in order to obtain and to process the information needed to make the suggestions. The use of intelligent agents significantly improves the quality of the recommendations made by the system. This improvement is achieved by suggesting products and services depending on other users' purchasing patterns while also considering the different product types and quantities sold by the business organizations that are part of the system.