E-commerce is an activity of buying or selling goods and services over the Internet, performed by companies and individuals. Among the biggest and most notable e-commerce platforms are Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, Taobao and others. E-commerce markets are growing at noticeable rates, especially in the recent years. It allows customers to overcome geographical barriers and allows them to purchase products anytime and from anywhere. Research show that more and more customers are moving to online shopping and are not planning to move back to the face-to-face shopping. In addition to the opportunities, e-commerce brings more challanges that should be addressed accordingly.
The workshop will be about applications in E-Commerce and it will be devided into three parts:
In the first part we will learn the fundamentals of e-commerce, understand how the e-commerce platforms work and what are the current challanges.
We will do an extensive overview of the latest research directions in e-commerce by going over recent research papers published in this field.
Then, in the second part, the students will split to small teams (4 members each team), and propose a topic for a final project (relevant to the e-commerce platform and solve an existing problem or propose a new feature).
After proposal approval the teams will develop the projects during the semester.
Finally, in the third part each team will submit the project and do a presentation to the rest of the teams at the last week of the semester (in English).
First two weeks will be lectures and individual meetings with the teams which should build a minimum required basics for the rest of the course (the first part).
By the end of the two weeks the students will have to split up to groups (4 members) and prepare project proposal.
The task will be developing a e-commerce related project, which will solve one of the proposed problems. The project can be an implementation of a feature from one of the related paper or proposal of a new feature/algorithm.
The project can be a standalone application (Mobile/Web) or an extension for given system. Everything is up to the team.
The course will have a control point - midterm meeting where each team will present their detailed project description, software/platform choices, work split between the group members, work plan.
This will be done in order to see the progress of the teams and ensure that the project converges in the given time.
The project should be done during the semester and the final presentation will be held at the last week of the semester.