Comparison Shopping Agents: the essential characteristics and challenges to be met

Comparison shopping agents are Web applications that can help on-line shoppers to find the optimized value for commodities and/or services by parsing product descriptions. Adaption of mobile agent system, which has capability of effectively supporting the distributed applications in open and heterogeneous environments, is best suited for comparison shopping agent implementation. The major goal of this paper is to present a study of the characteristics of different stake holders in multiple perspectives. The paper addresses various issues and challenges, indicating a need for further empirical research.