Currently, most of the Internet retailers or
companies build their online stores at online malls. But
before an online store is built, the mall will request
retailer/company to open an account for accessing the
store online. So a retailer/company who has joined n
stores at an online mall will open n accounts. Also these
retailers and companies often extend their marketing
channels to achieve the “group fighting” effect.
Consequently, they need to control the inventory of
virtual and physical marketing channels simultaneously
so as to reduce their running costs and avoid inventory
shortage. On the other hand, when the number of the
products approaches hundreds or thousands, they also
need to monitor the sale amount of a product at different
online malls, and the available amount of the product in
warehouse. Tin fact, the sale and inventory must be
balanced for all products to maximize profit or reduce
the inventory amount allocated to each online mall so as
to lower the total cost. Therefore, in this study, we
develop a sale management system, named the
Web-Crawler-based Sale Management System (WCSMS
for short), which collects sale data from different online
malls by using web crawlers. Users can then access the
data and browse the data on the webpages of the
WCSMS. Meanwhile, this sale management system can
be used to solve the inventory problem of the online
malls and the distribution problem of physical malls.
Furthermore, the sale data collected by web crawlers
and analyzed by employing data mining techniques can
serve as a decision reference for promoting and pricing
their products.