Creating Cyber Counterparts of Small-Scale Offline Stores for Location-Based Mobile Commerce

Abstract

Location-based mobile commerce (m-commerce) service has become a very useful mobile service. It helps mobile users to make better decisions by providing information about the neighborhood stores to the user. However, one of the important issues that location-based m-commerce services are facing today is the collection of information about the real-world stores. Collecting information about small-scale B2C offline stores is challenging because offline stores are distributed irregularly over a wide area, and most stores do not have a cyber counterpart such as a website. This makes it difficult to collect information about the store. Basically, B2C offline stores should have their websites on the Internet to promote location-based m-commerce. The information of these cyber counterparts will be rich contents for locationbased m-commerce services. However, operating a cyber counterpart is a burden on small-scale store owners because it expensive and requires a considerable amount of effort. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient way to operate the cyber counterparts of small-scale offline stores. Our approach makes it easy to create and manage a store's cyber counterpart with support for various mobile devices.