Design and development of a cooperative shopping system with shared discussion space

At current on-line shops, buyers almost independently enjoy shopping without anyone's help. However there are many cases when they cooperate with people such as personal advisers or salespersons at real shops, especially at apparel shops. In the process of cooperation many evaluation data on candidate products are exchanged between buyers and personal advisers. These evaluation data can be used for various services and marketing activities at the shop side. We propose a shared discussion space for cooperative users by sharing information on candidate products and evaluation data on them. The shared discussion space provides a dynamic configuration mechanism from many viewpoints of criteria in order to help buyers to decide which item to buy.