Authors:
Britta Fuchs
;
Thomas Ritz
and
Henriette Stykow
Affiliation:
FH Aachen, Germany
Keyword(s):
Blended Shopping, Mass Customization, Additive Manufacturing, eCommerce, Retail, Toolkit, Customer Experience, Distributed Manufacture.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
B2B, B2C and C2C
;
Communication and Software Technologies and Architectures
;
e-Business
;
e-Business and e-Commerce
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Society, e-Business and e-Government
;
Software Agents and Internet Computing
;
Web 2.0 and Social Networking Controls
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
Abstract:
This paper starts from the idea that combining processes of eCommerce and traditional commerce (blended shopping) can bring advantages for customers and retailer. One possibility to take the emerged individualization trend on consumer markets into account is to integrate latest rapid prototyping technologies (additive manufacturing) in order to enhance the blended shopping concept. The availability of Internet can be seen as the enabler for such services. First blended shopping and rapid prototyping with its latest developments of additive manufacturing (AM) are explained. Then their impacts on the aimed individualized blended shopping concept are depicted with the help of a use case. From this use case the benefits for business and consumers are derived and additionally the framework of a needed AM-toolkit is concretized. Finally the paper closes with a future outlook on the necessity of research in the field of individualization aspects of blended shopping and web standards.