A system and method for assisting a customer in choosing among commodities based on a business profile of the customer that includes asking the customer for a definition of its business; searching a decision rules database and applying decision rules to the business definition; creating a set of business requirement questions based upon the applied decision rules database; answering the set of business requirement questions by the customer; implementing a business rule filter to the answers of the set of business requirement questions; recommending to the customer commodity types based upon the business rule implementation; and optimizing the recommended commodity types to find the best value commodity, which can be a product or service.