Product selection in Internet business: a fuzzy approach

In this paper, we propose a methodology which helps customers buy products through the Internet. This procedure takes into account the customer's level of desire in the product attributes, which are normally fuzzy, or in linguistically defined terms. The concept of fuzzy number will be used to measure the degree of similarities of the available products to that of the customer's requirements. The degrees of similarities so obtained over all the attributes give rise to the fuzzy probabilities and hence the fuzzy expected values of availing a product on the Internet as per the customer's requirement. Attribute‐wise the fuzzy expected values are compared with those of the available products on the Internet and the product that is closest to the customer's preference is selected as the best product. The multi‐attribute weighted average method is used here to evaluate and hence to select the best product.