If the pundits are to be believed the Internet will revolutionize shopping. Online marketplaces bring a lot of potential advantages: publishing catalogs is cheap, there are many different ways for people to access stores, and merchants can present multiple levels of descriptions of items tailored to the individual customer's interest. The sale itself can be finalized online via credit card or digital cash transactions. The items for sale do not even have to be physical. Virtual objects such as music data, movies, and the text of books can all be sold directly online without every having to transfer a single atom. And software agents can be employed to ease the process of locating items and negotiating a trade.
But virtual marketplaces have a lot of potential for alienation. People like the feel of ownership of physical objects; are representations of objects or purely virtual objects compelling? The physical space of a marketplace is an important functional component of the shopping experience; what happens to shopping when physical space disappears? How can people be made comfortable with turning over the social role of negotiation to software agents? Some speculation is possible based on the analysis of what aspects of existing marketplaces work, the lessons learned from physical markets, home shopping channels and the Kasbah marketplace. The answers lie in the development of more effective interface technologies to better mediate between people and the virtual world of the online marketplace.
A primary way to enhance the online shopping experience is to actualize the objects of trade, make the items for sale and the currency more real. Effective virtual stores present their items using all the richness the media affords. The lush pictures and eloquent descriptions of items on television help sell goods. Similarly, online stores need to make better use of technology to make the objects feel real. Virtual reality technology presents an interesting opportunity for simulating an object instead of just representing it. A buyer could download a three dimensional model of an object and manipulate it in a detailed virtual environment, improving his or her connection to the items for sale. And in the cases of purely virtual objects such as movie data the difference between a simulated object and the real object disappears entirely. Virtual objects are most naturally sold online.
Actualizing the currency a buyer uses to purchase goods is more problematic. There are many digital cash schemes under development now [4]. Most of them use the metaphor of an online ``wallet'' to store the user's digital cash tokens but the user interfaces to these digital money schemes do not make the digital cash in the virtual wallet feel real. One cannot grasp the bills or riffle through them to count money. It is not clear that grounding money in the online world is necessary. In existing virtual marketplaces consumers seem quite comfortable using the abstraction of credit cards. Perhaps money has become a concept in our culture with no need for physical presence.
Virtual marketplaces currently suffer from a lack of space. There is the vague location of the information source where one finds the item for sale, the catalog or the web site, but these spaces are limited in power and socialability. Television marketplaces solve this problem by presenting a simulation of a social space, creating a sense of a pleasant room and other people through clever use of television sets and the voices of other shoppers.
The medium of the Internet also allows many possibilities for creating a social, spatial experience while shopping. Many online marketplace developers refer to the ``virtual mall,'' an evocative phrase that suggests that online marketplaces should duplicate the successful features of real world shopping malls. The most important component of the virtual mall is creating a place for shoppers to be, a simulated environment. Other shoppers are present in the virtual mall, creating an air of sociability. Participants can see each other, look at store windows together, have chance meetings, carry on conversations. The beginnings of the technology to do this are already in place in the form of virtual community spaces such as MUDs and social virtual realities. As these technologies become more effective it should be possible to present a simulation of the traditional marketplace entirely in the Internet medium.
Finally, online shopping presents the possibility to remove the necessity of much of the interactive processes of shopping today. People can create software agents to do their bidding in online stores, agents that search out items and negotiate sales without any need for the intervention of people. It is possible that the marketplace could be entirely automated.
Such a future would make shopping more convenient at the risk of alienating consumers. In order for software agents to succeed, some way must be found to make people trust them. A requirement for trust is to make it easier to understand how an agent works and what it is doing. Interface technology for agents is not very developed. Is personalization of agents the way to go, to give people the metaphor that their software agent is of the same status as a human being and can be understood in those terms? Is there some way to expose the inner workings of the software agents, perhaps a virtual object version of GOOP [1] where the behavioral components of agents are directly manipulable? Can agents be located in the same simulated space as shoppers, thereby giving agents more presence? These research questions are crucial to the success of agent-mediated shopping.
As online marketplaces are created the design choices that are made in their construction will shape the experiences of consumers. To make online shopping more familiar it may be useful to try to simulate the physical world, to bring into the virtual world analogs of physical objects and spaces. Software agents have the potential to take on characteristics of virtual people in the new marketplace, but only if they can be made to seem real enough that people understand and trust them. It is both possible and desirable to create a virtual experience that is as rich as a traditional physical marketplace.
