3.5.2 Browsing and querying a single shop 

The system will offer several ways to see what one or more businesses are offering. To 

look at the stock of a single shop, the user should be able to click on a  shop  icon of any 

business  that  has  one,  which  will  open  a  page  listing  details  of  the  products  and/or 

services offered by that business. For example, a shop specialising in laptop computers 

will  list  the  details  of  each  machine  in  turn,  such  as  make, model, price, processor and 

RAM.  

In the case of a single service, the information presented is likely to be relatively static. 

There would be details of availability times, additionl contact addresses, perhaps hourly 

rates. When browsing a long list of products offered by a retailer, however, it would be 

useful to perform searches within the list to narrow down the options. By entering search 

terms in a web form, the user could choose to display a specific type of product within 

the inventory, or even narrow the search further to show only those products less than or 

equal  to  a  specified  price.  So,  for  example,  he/she  should  be  able  to  find  all  of  the 

Compaq  laptops  offered  by  the  vendor  costing  less  than   2000,  or  all  of  the  used  Ford 

Fiestas with a 1999 registration or later costing no more than  8,500. 

3.5.3 Browsing and querying multiple shops 

Searching through one shop at a time can still be a tedious process. Far better would be 

the ability to look at all of the competing shops in one area at a time. This would, in a 

sense,   take  out  the  middle  man   and  link  the  user  directly  to  the  products.  The 

impression  for  the  user  would  be  comparable  to  looking  at  any  Web based  trading  site 

like  Amazon  or  eBay,  except  that  the  product  selection  is  made  across  the  set  of  stock 

offered by local retailers. 

3.5.4 Smart forms 

One feature which materialised rather late into the implementation stage, but very much 

merited  inclusion,  was   smart  forms   and  it  came  from  implementing  the   filtering  by 

category  idea above. 

If a user performs a search of the main business database and a list of related categories is 

returned,  we  can  take  a  good  guess  as  to  what  it  is  they  are  looking  for.  This  is  an 

opportunity  to  further  streamline  the  shop browsing  process.  It  should  be  possible  to 

include a secondary form on the results page through which the user can search the shops 

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