Evaluating Retailers in a Smart-buying Environment using Smart City Infrastructures

Abstract

In modern cities, most citizens are interested in buying from e-shops or mostly buy from large shopping brands. This is a challenge for small and medium-sized retailers, who cannot afford to maintain IT infrastructures and skills. The ongoing R&D project SMARTBUY, tries to close this gap by providing a platform for small and medium-sized retailers to become the place where they can easily make their products and promotions visible online for local audiences, along with a mobile application for customers. An important issue in this context is the evaluation of the retailers. In this work, we introduce a new evaluation application for assessing the quality of the retailer services. Customers have the chance to rate the behavior and the offers that the retailers provide to them. This evaluation service is based on the SMARTBUY platform and is developed upon the OrganiCity Experimentation Platform. The evaluation application is a novel approach to generate knowledge for the retailer shops inside a future city using both data from open city datasets as well as feedback from citizens. Such an application is deemed useful to both customers, to identify retailers with best offers and services, and retailers as an incentive to improve their services.