Building decision support systems for a Virtual Shopping Center

The electronic commerce. also known as e-commerce. has become an important part of the economy in the last few years. This category of commerce is widely used by large companies. At the same time, it got harder for small companies to find their share in the virtual market. A Virtual Shopping Center. or VSC. is a proposal for the small and medium-sized sales companies to get into the cybernetic world. In order to obtain an optimal sale policy, the VSC would provide a decision support system. In this system. the whole set of structural and operational data is stored. preferably, in a data warehouse. and submitted to data mining techniques. There are several potentially valuable data mining approaches in the commercial context. One of them is proposed in this paper. Applying neural networks concepts, the clustering of the customers into distinct groups is proposed. so it is possible to direct the marketing according to the cluster one belongs to. Through unsupervised learning, a Kohonen network would be able to make the clustering.