Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Improving customer decisions in web-based e-commerce through guerrilla modding

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 3, pages 1008–1010 (2021)Cite this article

Subjects

The provisioning of information about product attributes in e-commerce environments is today left entirely to owners of online platforms. Product transparency in online stores can be increased by client-side enrichment of retailer Web pages.

The e-commerce share of global retail sales has more than doubled in the years 2016–2020 and is expected to reach 21% in 2023. In e-commerce environments, customers’ cost for comparing different products is low and they can make shopping decisions that better match their desires and needs. However, the type and amount of information provided are currently mainly controlled by the owners of e-commerce platforms. To tackle this imbalance, consumers can be given more control over product information with post-production Web customization (‘modding’) on the client-side, without depending on the entity that controls the server-side Web content (‘guerrilla’). Here we describe an example of such user-driven augmentation of product webpages using a browser plug-in.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Fig. 1: Products with and without Nutri-Score label plug-in.

References

  1. Julià, C. R. & Hercberg, S. Public Health Panorama 3, 712–725 (2017).

    Google Scholar 

  2. Hill, J. O. & Peters, J. C. Science 280, 1371–1374 (1998).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. World Health Organization. https://www.euro.who.int/en/countries/france/news/news/2017/03/france-becomes-one-of-the-first-countries-in-region-to-recommend-colour-coded-front-of-pack-nutrition-labelling-system (2017).

  4. Perez, J. Food Drug Cosmet. Law J. 36, 381–392 (1981).

    Google Scholar 

  5. Julia, C. R. & Hercberg, S. Am. J. Public Health 108, 318–320 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Carter, O. B., Mills, B. W., Lloyd, E. & Phan, T. Eur. J. Clin. Nutr. 67, 31–35 (2013).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Temple, N. J. & Fraser, J. Nutrition 30, 257–260 (2014).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Bouvin, N. O. In Proc. Tenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia 91–100 (ACM, 1999).

  9. Díaz, O., Arellano, C., Aldalur, I., Medina, H. & Firmenich, S. In Web Information Systems Engineering WISE 2014 239–307 (Springer, 2014).

  10. Fuchs, K. PhD thesis; https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000450599 (2020).

  11. Alrizah, M., Zhu, S., Xing, X. & Wang, G. In Proc. Internet Measurement Conference 230–244 (ACM, 2019),

  12. BGH. ZR 154/16; https://dejure.org/dienste/vernetzung/rechtsprechung?Gericht=BGH&Datum=19.04.2018&Aktenzeichen=I%20ZR%20154%2F16 (19 April 2018).

  13. Vallade, J. Rutgers Law Rev. 61, 823–853 (2009).

    Google Scholar 

  14. Kuznetsov, S. Comput. Soc. https://doi.org/10.1145/1215942.1215943 (2006).

  15. Taylor, A., Wilson, F., Hendrie, G., Allman-Farinelli, M. & Noakes, M. Br. J. Nutr. 114, 2129–2137 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Wild, A., Ciortea, A. & Mayer, S. In Companion Proc. Web Conference 2020 650–654 (ACM, 2020).

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank E. Toniato for his support with the implementation of the browser plug-in. We thank the Swiss National Science Fund for its funding within project 188402 as well as GS1 Global for its funding of the Auto-ID Labs of ETH Zurich and the University of St Gallen.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science, University of St Gallen, St Gallen, Switzerland

    Simon Mayer, Dominic Brügger, Jie Lian & Andrei Ciortea

  2. Distributed Systems Group, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Simon Mayer

  3. Auto-ID Labs ETH/HSG, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Klaus Fuchs

Authors
  1. Simon Mayer
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Klaus Fuchs
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Dominic Brügger
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Jie Lian
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Andrei Ciortea
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

S.M.: conceptualization, methodology, supervision, writing-original draft preparation; K.F.: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, formal analysis, supervision, writing-review and editing; D.B.: methodology, software, resources; J.L.: methodology, software, resources, investigation, formal analysis, writing-review and editing; A.C.: conceptualization, writing-review and editing.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Simon Mayer.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Mayer, S., Fuchs, K., Brügger, D. et al. Improving customer decisions in web-based e-commerce through guerrilla modding. Nat Mach Intell 3, 1008–1010 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00424-w

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00424-w

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing