Remembering What You Forget in an Online Shopping Context

Abstract

Problems occur for users when they attempt to navigate or purchase items from a virtual shopping environment that has to correlate in the physical world. These problems arise in part, because online shoppers do not have the benefit of external memory provided by the physical world. The memory zones idea attempts to solve these problems by providing an online parallel to this external memory. The system reported uses a profile of previous purchases and a representation of the physical environment of the actual shop to recommend items to shoppers, that they may have otherwise forgotten because of the lack of suitable external memory.