The anatomy of a sales configurator: an empirical study of 111 cases

  • Authors:
  • Ebrahim Khalil Abbasi;Arnaud Hubaux;Mathieu Acher;Quentin Boucher;Patrick Heymans

  • Affiliations:
  • PReCISE, University of Namur, Belgium;PReCISE, University of Namur, Belgium;Irisa, Inria, University of Rennes 1, France;PReCISE, University of Namur, Belgium;PReCISE, University of Namur, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • CAiSE'13 Proceedings of the 25th international conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Nowadays, mass customization has been embraced by a large portion of the industry. As a result, the web abounds with sales configurators that help customers tailor all kinds of goods and services to their specific needs. In many cases, configurators have become the single entry point for placing customer orders. As such, they are strategic components of companies' information systems and must meet stringent reliability, usability and evolvability requirements. However, the state of the art lacks guidelines and tools for efficiently engineering web sales configurators. To tackle this problem, empirical data on current practice is required. The first part of this paper reports on a systematic study of 111 web sales configurators along three essential dimensions: rendering of configuration options, constraint handling, and configuration process support. Based on this, the second part highlights good and bad practices in engineering web sales configurator. The reported quantitative and qualitative results open avenues for the elaboration of methodologies to (re-)engineer web sales configurators.