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Improving customer decisions in web-based e-commerce through guerrilla modding

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 3, pages 1008–1010 (2021)Cite this article

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The provisioning of information about product attributes in e-commerce environments is today left entirely to owners of online platforms. Product transparency in online stores can be increased by client-side enrichment of retailer Web pages.

The e-commerce share of global retail sales has more than doubled in the years 2016–2020 and is expected to reach 21% in 2023. In e-commerce environments, customers’ cost for comparing different products is low and they can make shopping decisions that better match their desires and needs. However, the type and amount of information provided are currently mainly controlled by the owners of e-commerce platforms. To tackle this imbalance, consumers can be given more control over product information with post-production Web customization (‘modding’) on the client-side, without depending on the entity that controls the server-side Web content (‘guerrilla’). Here we describe an example of such user-driven augmentation of product webpages using a browser plug-in.

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Fig. 1: Products with and without Nutri-Score label plug-in.

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Acknowledgements

We thank E. Toniato for his support with the implementation of the browser plug-in. We thank the Swiss National Science Fund for its funding within project 188402 as well as GS1 Global for its funding of the Auto-ID Labs of ETH Zurich and the University of St Gallen.

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Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science, University of St Gallen, St Gallen, Switzerland

    Simon Mayer, Dominic Brügger, Jie Lian & Andrei Ciortea

  2. Distributed Systems Group, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Simon Mayer

  3. Auto-ID Labs ETH/HSG, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Klaus Fuchs

Authors
  1. Simon Mayer
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  2. Klaus Fuchs
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  3. Dominic Brügger
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  4. Jie Lian
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  5. Andrei Ciortea
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Contributions

S.M.: conceptualization, methodology, supervision, writing-original draft preparation; K.F.: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, formal analysis, supervision, writing-review and editing; D.B.: methodology, software, resources; J.L.: methodology, software, resources, investigation, formal analysis, writing-review and editing; A.C.: conceptualization, writing-review and editing.

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Correspondence to Simon Mayer.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Mayer, S., Fuchs, K., Brügger, D. et al. Improving customer decisions in web-based e-commerce through guerrilla modding. Nat Mach Intell 3, 1008–1010 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00424-w

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