Abstract: The customer segmentation software according to the present invention automatically finds or creates profiles of prototypical customers in a large e-commerce database. The software matches all existing customer data in the database to one or more of the prototypical customers. The resulting customer segmentation is an effective summarization of the database and is useful for a range of business applications. Applications of the customer segmentation system include the development of customized web sites, the creation of targeted promotional offers and the prediction of consumer behavior.

Abstract: A system for optimizing the promotional sale of a product, a product segment, or a category which may take into account related products or competing products comprising means for generating a three-dimensional data structure corresponding to the sales history for a product, the data structure dimensions corresponding to an event type domain, a time domain, and a unit of measurement domain, means for populating the three-dimensional data structure, a neural network, means for training the neural network and means for applying sales objectives and constraints to the neural network.