Until now, we have believed that one of advantages of cyber market is that it can virtually display and sell goods because it does not necessary maintains expensive physical shops and inventories. But, in a highly competitive environment, business model that do away with goods in stock must be modified. As we know in the case of AMAZON, leading companies already consider merchandise management as a critical success factor in their business model. That is, a solution to compete against one’s competitors in a highly competitive environment is merchandise management as in the traditional retail market.
Cyber market has not only past sales data but also web log data before sales data that contains information of path that customer search and purchase on cyber market as compared with traditional retail market. So if we can correctly analyze the characteristics of before sales patterns using web log data, we can better prepare for the potential customers and effectively manage inventories and merchandises. We introduce a systematic analysis method to extract useful data for merchandise management - demand forecasting, evaluating & selecting - using web mining that is the application of data mining techniques to the World Wide Web. We use various techniques of web mining such as clustering, mining association rules, mining sequential patterns.
