During the last years, marketing of products via the Internet became more and more important for both customers and manufacturers. However, most products sold today cannot be customised to satisfy the buyer’s individual requirements. Configuration functionality incorporated in current ERP systems as well as industrial product development software addresses the problem of fully automated design of products according to specification. However such extensive functionality is difficult to implement, requires extensive resources to run and a large part of its costly features offers no added value in an e-commerce context. E-commerce and the Internet in general pose a number of specific requirements as e.g. lightweight simple design, good scalability, interactivity, user friendliness etc. In order to meet these demands, a new method of configuration has been developed. This method focuses on non-automatic, interactive, user-friendly configuration of product variants based on a simple yet flexible method in order t o accommodate large numbers of users and a large variety of different products.
