Semantic Shopping: A Literature Study

Abstract

The digitalization of the economy and society overall has a significant impact on customers’ shopping behavior. After being conditioned by experiences in entertainment or simple Internet search, customers increasingly expect that a smart shopping assistant understands his/her shopping intentions and transfers these to shopping recommendations. Thus, the emerging opportunity in this context is to facilitate an intention-based shopping experience similar to the way semantic search engines provide responses to enquiries. In order to progress this new area, we differentiate alternative types of shopping intentions to provide the first set of conversation patterns. Grounded in the Speech Act Theory and a structured literature review, semantic shopping is defined and different types of shopping intentions are deduced.