Mobile In-store Personalized Services

The mobile shopping assistant (MSA) is a mobile application platform to deliver real-time, in-store, and personalized services, such as personalized product offerings and in-store customer advisory support, to improve the shopping experiences of in-store customers. The service delivery network that powers the MSA involves retail stores and their business partners such as manufacturers. This paper presents the core technologies that we developed in this cross-organizational service network to support the MSA and its personalized services, with focus on service delivery, customer behavior understanding and information sharing. Our event-based techniques allow customers, stores and manufacturers to deliver and consume the services in a loosely coupled manner, thus solving a critical store-specific real-time engagement problem in a seamless way. Service response tracking enables the stores to construct a comprehensive view of a customerpsilas in-store shopping behavior. Finally, the cross-organizational authorization-based access control mechanism effectively enforces information sharing between the stores and their partners.