Aggregator websites of Electronic gadgets listings decide if they want to pick a particular listing from an e-commerce website and display on their own website. Selection of the right items to list is essential to customers selecting products for purchase, therefore leading to higher revenues.
In a busy supermarket the number of checkout lanes is constant. Not all customers buy in large volumes. Some buy in small quantity but are forced to wait in long queues at the checkout counter. Our objective is to demarcate a few checkout lanes as "fast checkout lanes" which would exclusively serve these customers (who shop in low quantity), thereby lowering their waiting time. The challenge however is to predict an optimum number of fast checkout lanes, such that on one hand they are able to process these customers fast and on the other they do not remain empty.
Currently Mom & Pop Stores do not have much insight into the price changes of electronic
products. This information is useful for the stores to plan for inventory purchases prior to the
price increases and generate profits on the products due to the increased price. Currently, this
decision to buy is based on intuition and there is no real science or reasoning behind it.
Prof. Galit Shmueli, Institute of Service Science, College of Technology Management, National Tsing Hua University, 101 Kuang Fu Road Sec. 2, Hsinchu 30013 Taiwan
