Design and Implementation of a Social Marketplace for a Startup based on a Content Management System. Application of Sentiment Analysis for sensing customer feedback

Álvaro Gericke. (2017). Design and Implementation of a Social Marketplace for a Startup based on a Content Management System. Application of Sentiment Analysis for sensing customer feedback. Final Career Project (TFG). ETSI Telecomunicación, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

Abstract:
Nowadays, digitalization within nearly all areas is a fact. However, there are several market niches where new technologies do not coexist with traditional non Internet based methods. This is the case of retail stores specially, as hardly some of them have only a simple web page. They see this transformation really expensive and difficult, but the real problem is the lack of knowledge in the available tools that practically do all the hard work for them. Moreover, although the number of web applications that allow customers to compare related products or services from different shops has increased year by year lately, there are none of them that compare the offer in so popular sports in Spain such as surf, skiing and cycling. What is more, today the most valuable things on internet for shops are their customers reviews and comments. Then, it is really important to know at first hand their customer's sensations and experiences related to their products or services, what they think should be improved and what do they like the most. For all this problems, the end-of-degree project will be centered in the development of a renting web platform of products related to ski, surf and cycling. Through this platform, retail shops will be able to manage their products and bookings they receive. On the other hand, users will be able to compare similar products from different nearby shops and book the one that fits them best in all aspects. Besides, special attention will be paid to the system which will manage the comments and reviews so that users can have objective feedback from other customers that have already book the products they are looking for. In order know and analyse what users comment about shop products, an emotion analysis functionality will be developed so that retail shops, which do not know much about programming tools or available emotion analysis tools, have this plugin in the web platform that helps them identify the main problems users are complaining about and be able to take action. It ill generate also an improvement and optimization in the user experience. This web platform will be developed with a content management system, concretely with Wordpress, and functionality will be added with the available plugins for Wordpress, such as Woocommerce, that will allows to turn a simple blog page into an e-Commerce. Also new plugins will be developed in order to reach the requirements of the emotion analysis system provided to shops. The objectives that want to be reached with this project are: -Acquire advanced knowledge in Wordpress, the worlwide's most popular CMS, and its API. -Go deep into Object-oriented programming techniques. -Gain the ability to develop a marketplace in Wordpress, and extend its functionality with existing plugins. -Learn how to develop personalized plugins for Wordpress and connect external applications with the Wordpress's core. -Get to know the available tools about emotion analysis, and integrate them with other softwares. In order to reach all the requirements, at first a study through the available plugins for Wordpress that can cover all or part of the functionalities described previously will be carried. Once this plugins have been identified, Wordpress will be installed and configured in a web page. Then, the selected plugins will be installed, configured and integrated. Next, the development of the emotion analysis plugin for Wordpress will be carried to provide the retail shops with the tools described beforewards. Lastly, proof cases for that plugin will be carried out, and once it is consider it works correctly, it will be integrated with the selected Wordpress theme.