An important element in retailing is the use of impulse purchases; generally small items that are bought by consumers on the spur of the moment. By some estimates, impulse purchases make up approximately 50 percent of all spending by consumers. While impulse purchases have been studied in the brick-and-mortar retail environment, they have not been researched in the online retail environment. With e-commerce growing rapidly and approaching $20 billion per year in the Canadian and US markets, this is an important unexplored area. Using real purchasing behaviour from visitors to the Reunion website of Huntsville High School in Ontario Canada, I explored factors that influence the likelihood of an impulse purchase in an online retail environment. Consistent with diminishing sensitivity (mental accounting and the psychophysics of pricing), the results indicate that the likelihood of a consumer purchasing the impulse item increases with the total amount spent on other items. The results also show that presenting the offer in a popup is a more effective location and presentation mode than embedding the offer into the checkout page and increases the likelihood of the consumer making an impulse purchase. In addition, the results confirm that providing a reason to purchase by linking a $1 donation for a charity to the impulse item increases the frequency of the impulse purchase.

An important element in retailing is the use of impulse purchases; generally small items that are bought by consumers on the spur of the moment. By some estimates, impulse purchases make up approximately 50 percent of all spending by consumers. While impulse purchases have been studied in the brick-and-mortar retail environment, they have not been researched in the online retail environment. With e-commerce growing rapidly and approaching $20 billion per year in the Canadian and US markets, this is an important unexplored area. Using real purchasing behaviour from visitors to the Reunion website of Huntsville High School in Ontario Canada, I explored factors that influence the likelihood of an impulse purchase in an online retail environment. Consistent with diminishing sensitivity (mental accounting and the psychophysics of pricing), the results indicate that the likelihood of a consumer purchasing the impulse item increases with the total amount spent on other items. The results also show that presenting the offer in a popup is a more effective location and presentation mode than embedding the offer into the checkout page and increases the likelihood of the consumer making an impulse purchase. In addition, the results confirm that providing a reason to purchase by linking a $1 donation for a charity to the impulse item increases the frequency of the impulse purchase.

Information monitoring systems are publish-subscribe systems that continuously track information changes and notify users (or programs acting on behalf of humans) of relevant updates according to specified thresholds. Internet-scale information monitoring presents a number of new challenges. First, automated change detection is harder when sources are autonomous and updates are performed asynchronously. Second, information source heterogeneity makes the problem of modelling and representing changes harder than ever. Third, efficient and scalable mechanisms are needed to handle a large and growing number of users and thousands or even millions of monitoring triggers fired at multiple sources. In this dissertation, we model users' monitoring requests using continual queries (CQs) and present a suite of efficient and scalable solutions to large scale information monitoring over structured or semi-structured data sources. A CQ is a standing query that monitors information sources for interesting events (triggers) and notifies users when new information changes meet specified thresholds. In this dissertation, we first present the system level facilities for building an Internet-scale continual query system, including the design and development of two operational CQ monitoring systems OpenCQ and WebCQ, the engineering issues involved, and our solutions. We then describe a number of research challenges that are specific to large-scale information monitoring and the techniques developed in the context of OpenCQ and WebCQ to address these challenges. Example issues include how to efficiently process large number of continual queries, what mechanisms are effective for building a scalable distributed trigger system that is capable of handling tens of thousands of triggers firing at hundreds of data sources, how to effectively disseminate fresh information to the right users at the right time. We have developed a suite of techniques to optimize the processing of continual queries, including an effective CQ grouping scheme, an auxiliary data structure to support group-based indexing of CQs, and a differential CQ evaluation algorithm (DRA). The third contribution is the design of an experimental evaluation model and testbed to validate the solutions. We have engaged our evaluation using both measurements on real systems (OpenCQ/WebCQ) and simulation-based approach. To our knowledge, the research documented in this dissertation is to date the first one to present a focused study of research and engineering issues in building large-scale information monitoring systems using continual queries.

Given set of web pages labeled with ontological items, the level of similarity between two web pages is measured using the level of similarity between ontological items of pages labeled with. Using similarity measure between two pages, degree of similarity between two sequences of web page visits can be calculated as well. Using clustering algorithms, similar frequent sequences are grouped and representative sequences are selected from these groups. A new sequence is compared with all clusters and it is assigned to most similar one. Representatives of the most similar cluster can be used in several real world cases. They can be used for predicting and prefetching the next page user will visit or for helping the navigation of user in the website. They can also be used to improve the structure of website for easier navigation. In this study the effect of time spent on each web page during the session is analyzed.

In this work the main aspects were discussed that need to be evaluated by establishing graphical user interface. There were discussed some user interface languages and technologies such as XML, XUL, XIML, XSLT, CSS, XHTML, analyzed some used methods for automated user interface generation. On a basis of this analysis, the proper method was chosen to apply for generating of user interface using ODRES method results. On the next stadeges of the work it was designed and developed prototype of the GUI generation system. The main goals were to develop cross-platform user interface, using as mutch as possible simplyer technologies along with that securing constant design on different web browsers. Generation process operates using the GUI specification stored in the MS SQL database and converting it to XML and along with the XSLT files used as parser. After these files are opened using web browser, XML and XSLT code is processed to an XHTML code. The process of the user interface generation is flexible and alows user change GUI’s appearance on the fly adjusting it’s specification stored on the database or XSLT rooles as well. During this work were made some ot the modifications to the ODRES database: appended few more attributes, describing graphical elements characteristics and web form relations; added extra tables.

Aim: The purpose of this study is to identify factors that can attract customers to buy online and help the grocers to improve their online grocery services to retain and obtain customers. Design/Methodology/Approach: A qualitative method was used, based on triangulation methodology including observation and interviews of manager and employees. Quantitative data was collected by handing out questionnaire to 204 potential customers and 30 existing customers. Findings: The study shows that product and service quality, time saving and convenience, web page layout, customers’ trust in grocers (service providers), store image and advertising are the important factors that customers consider when they decide to use online grocer service. E- grocers also need to consider these factors when they start online grocery service. Suggestions for Future Research: An extensive study with large population sample and co- operation from other companies can help to generalize the results. Future studies can be extended to include drive-in and shared reception box service method, and consider the cost for the customers in e-grocery sector.

This dissertation reports on an action research project that guided the development of the Goudmyn (www.onnet.up.ac.za), a web-based information resource for Afrikaans language teachers. The information needs and utilisation of information resources by 78 Afrikaans First Language teachers were determined by means of a questionnaire and focus group discussions. The quality of the Goudmyn as information resource for and Afrikaans teachers' utilisation thereof were formally assessed. From the data it is evident that Afrikaans language teachers do not utilise the Internet as an information resource to a high degree. Nevertheless, statistics of visits to the Goudmyn indicate that the resource is being utilised increasingly. Reasons for low levels of Internet utilisation by the respondents include the following: a lack of Internet access, time, training, relevant information, awareness of resources and integration of ICT skills into the curriculum. The study found that a web site such as the Goudmyn has the potential to play a central role in supporting Afrikaans language teachers, if the teachers are trained and made aware of the use and applications of the Internet for teaching purposes. / Thesis (MA (Information Science))--University of Pretoria, 2004. / Information Science / unrestricted

This thesis deals with controlling the irrigation system. In the introduction there is a theoretical analysis of the irrigation units, the designed system and the programs used. The core of the paper is a description of the software development and visualization software developed. Subsequently, the process of designing printed circuit boards is described. The conclusion of the work is to verify the functionality of the irrigation system and the summary of the results achieved.

This diploma thesis analyses and tries to solve a communication problem found in a roofing company situated in Průhonice nearby Prague. The solution is presented as a web application and new web page. The diploma thesis is constructed as follows: an analysis, the problem description, suggestion of a solution, creating the suggested solution and trial launching. In the end, the thesis evaluates the costs and benefits of the web application and web page.

This thesis deals with the design and implementation of the page layout manager for a web user interface composed of components. A part of solution is also a new XML format for configuring of the manager of page layout and composition and a new application interface for components. The created system has met the requirements of the European project KiWi and has passed the acceptance tests of its project team.