Patent ID: 6356879
Filing Date: 2002-03-12
Classification: G06Q,Y10S

Abstract:
A method for providing product recommendations to customers of an e-commerce web-site, the e-commerce web site having a plurality of products offered for sale there at, said method comprising the steps of:deriving product characterizations only for products that have actually been browsed or purchased by the customers of the e-commerce web-site, the products comprised in the plurality of products, the product characterizations being based on text descriptions of the products; creating individual customer characterizations for each of the customers based on the concise product characterizations, each of the individual customer characterizations corresponding to the products that were either browsed or purchased by a corresponding customer; clustering the individual customer characterizations based on similarities there between to form peer groups; categorizing each of the customers into one of the peer groups; providing product recommendations to a given customer based on an individual customer characterization of the given customer and information from a peer group to which the given customer is categorized; and re-evaluating a previous categorization of the current session customer into one of the peer groups, based on similarities between the updated individual customer characterization of the current session customer and the individual customer characterizations of other customers.