The ease and speed with which business transactions can be carried out over the Web has been a key driving force in the rapid growth of electronic commerce. The Web is revolutionizing the way business interact with each other (B2B) and with each customer (B2C). It has introduced entirely new ways of doing commerce, including e.g. auctions and reverse auctions. It also made it imperative for organizations and companies to optimize their electronic business.

Knowledge about the customer is fundamental for the establishment of viable e-commerce solutions. Web mining for e-commerce is the application of web mining techniques to acquire this knowledge for e-commerce. Typical concerns in e-commerce include improved cross-sells, up-sells, personalized ads, targeted assortments, improved conversion rates, and measurements of the effectiveness of actions.

The WEBKDD'2000 workshop, as successor of WEBKDD'99, concentrates on web mining for e-commerce. It aims to bring together e-commerce practitioners, tool vendors and data mining researchers and to foster the exchange of ideas, the discussion of currently proposed solutions and the establishment of an agenda for further emerging issues.

In response to call for papers, WEBKDD’2000 received 31 contributions. Each was reviewed by at least three program committee members. 7 submissions have been selected for presentation as long papers, and 6 as short papers. The main selection criterion was the quality of the idea. The short/long paper distinction is essentially an indicator of how far along the authors are in pursuing the idea. We would like to thank the members of the program committee for taking time to provide insightful critique, and thus ensuring the high quality of the workshop.

The paper presentation is divided into three sessions. The first session, titled Web personalization and recommender systems, is focused on how web mining can address one of the fundamental issues of B2C e-commerce, namely personalized customer experience. As often described by Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, and mentioned by Joseph Pine in his The Experience Economy, customer experience is the key to building customer loyalty to an on-line store, since leaving the store is exactly one click away. In this session we have 3 long and 2 short papers, which present the leading edge ideas in this important area.

The second session, titled Mining frameworks and case studies, presents experience reports from 4 groups on using web mining in various e-commerce applications. Any field of enquiry must have its ‘proof of the pudding is in eating it’, and the case studies presented here provide exactly that flavor.

The third session, titled Navigation analysis, focuses on how clickstream data can be analyzed to extract valuable e-commerce knowledge from it. Being able to analyze clickstream data provides an unprecedented opportunity to understand in detail the process leading up to a buy/not buy decision vs. just recording the final outcome - as is the case with point-of-sale data. Clickstream data is 80%+ of all data collected in most large-scale e-commerce environments, and contains a wealth of knowledge embedded in it. While the papers in this session present some of the leading ideas, the research in this area is just beginning and we have barely scratched the surface.

In closing, we would like to welcome you to WEBKDD’2000, which has certainly grown in size from its predecessor. As of the writing of this note, more than 170 people had shown interest in this workshop. This is a strong endorsement of the level of interest in this rapidly emerging field of inquiry.

The WEBKDD’2000 Organizing Committee

Ronny Kohavi
Brij Masand
Myra Spiliopoulou
Jaideep Srivastava