Toward Closed-Domain Conversational Item Listing Assistant for Improvement of Experiences of Older Adults in Customer-to-Customer (C2C) Marketplaces

Abstract

Due to the increased availability of internet-based services, the number of e-commerce users among older adults is steadily growing. However, little is known about how older adults would adapt to modern e-commerce services, especially in the case of customer-to-customer (C2C) marketplaces as buyers and sellers. To address that, we propose a closed-domain conversational chatbot assistant that guides older adults through the product listing process. We evaluated the usability of our tool with 10 participants, consisting of a pre-test survey and a post-task interview. We found that while older adults profciently operated with familiar functions such as text entry and photo taking, they faced challenges in understanding the purpose of each task and how tasks were related to each other. We suggest design implications for creating conversational chatbot assistants that help older adults sell items in C2C marketplaces.