read by user’s terminal, purchase price is searched
for via shopping network, finally a product is
purchased. Thanks to this, displayer and retailer are
guaranteed fair profits, Customer easy access to
desired information and business providers
commission made from their provision of shopping
network.
RFID-based Comparison Shopping model is
designed to channel incentives to displayer who
provided product information in the off-line shop. In
traditional commerce environment, an end user may
first check price information of a product in web
sites, visits shops to evaluate the product physically,
bargains over product price and went to another
shop if the first shop sells the product at far higher
prices than he saw on the web site. This kind of
sequence can explain one recent shopping trend.
When young-aged students visit a big shopping
mall, the clerk doesn’t pay great attention to them
because he assumes that those students might
already have full knowledge about product price and
expects the visitors will not buy a product if the shop
sells products more expensively than on the internet.
Under RFID-based comparison shopping, however,
displayer receives certain incentives for offering
product information and this encourages him not to
give up his role as displayer, benefiting both visitors
and displayer himself as win-win model. The
displayer would do his best for visitors because he
gets economic compensation in proportion to
visitors’ purchase frequency regardless of where
they actually buy a product. RFID-based
Comparison shopping model offer values to each
displayer and end user and especially the value to
displayer should be attractive enough so that the
display doesn’t have to feel the desire to become
seller. Furthermore when this model is made public
for the first time, potential rejection that participants
might feel over the division of one role into two
should be minimized so that more participation can
be taken. Technical requirement to implement this
model includes the installation of RFID reader
module in end user’s terminal and efficient display
of diverse shopping information into small display
screen that end users see.
2.2 U-Referral Marketing
In scenario B, business participants are referrer,
business provider and buyer who scans information
and purchases a product. Pertaining to value flow,
buyer reads information embedded in product’s tag
via his terminal and searches products based on DB
provided by business providers and finally buys the
product. Referrer also gets incentives. Potential
benefits of participants include easy access to
information for buyer, economic compensation for
referrer and promotion effect for business provider.
U-Referral marketing model ensures economic
incentives to information providers when an end
user obtains product information by scanning
another end user’s product and finally purchases a
product. U-Referral marketing is quite an interesting
model in that product-consuming end users function
as advertisement model, promotes products and
receives economic compensation instead of
advertiser employs a model to promote his product
via TV, magazines, the Internet, etc. Verbal
marketing or Amway model can be seen as the most
similar model to this new marketing model in the pre
U-Commerce times. But verbal marketing doesn’t
have incentive system to use and Amway model
albeit having incentive system has potentials to
bother buyers. In this regard U-Referral marketing
model is more reasonable because under the model
incentive system is available since a person who
scans a product can identify the information sources
and it is more acceptable since all participants can
enjoy certain level of freedom in scanning and/or
being scanned and therefore stay free from unwanted
bothering. Incentives provided to U-Referral
marketing’s participants include cyber money,
premiums and gift certificate to name a few.
As RFID-based comparison shopping model does,
U-Referral marketing model also requires some
technical feasibility such as the installation of RFID
reader module in end user’s terminal. Considering
great numbers of participants and broad service
range, however, the technical feasibility related to
security and accurate information control here is
seen to be higher than the former model. As social
requirement protecting privacy is a critical issue.
End users, referrer, should be offered authority to
decide on information provision easily and
anonymity should be guaranteed so that end users
who do scanning can not identify referrers who give
product information. To make U-Referral marketing
model successful, it’s important to create an
environment where end users accept and enjoy the
process of information collecting via product
scanning and incentive offering to information
providers as part of cultural phenomenon.
Both U-Referral marketing and RFID-based
comparison shopping business models are designed
to give economic compensation to information
providers. These two models show incentive
provision is attributed to seamlessness and such un-
stopped information flow is credited to the incentive
INCENTIVE-BASED AND PEER-ORIENTED DESIGN OF UBIQUITOUS COMMERCE
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