Related-Item Display Support Based on Customer Queries in a Store

Many stores are introducing tools for customer self-service, such as product searches and store navigation. Using mobile devices, such as the customers´ smartphones and tablets, services of this kind can be enhanced to allow a customer to obtain product and store information more quickly. In such an environment, a history of customer queries can be stored daily in a database system maintained by the store. To improve customer convenience and sales at a store, it is desirable to extract a customer´s potential requests in a store by analyzing the customer´s queries. In this study, we present a method of extracting a set of related items from a customer´s point of view by analyzing the customer´s queries in a store. From experiments using our prototype, we confirm that our proposed method can extract related-item candidates displayed on different shelves.