Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – Automated electrical financial or business practice or... – Electronic shopping
Reexamination Certificate
1999-05-25
2003-07-22
Coggins, Wynn W. (Department: 3625)
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
Electronic shopping
C705S001100, C705S080000, C705S027200
Reexamination Certificate
active
06598026
ABSTRACT:
RELATED APPLICATION DATA
The present application claims priority from U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/117,118 filed on Jan. 25, 1999, the entirety of which is incorporated by reference herein for all purposes.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to electronic commerce via the Internet. More specifically, the present invention relates to the facilitation of transactions between buyers and sellers on the World Wide Web.
Electronic commerce on the Internet, and specifically the World Wide Web, promises to transformi the economic landscape in ways which have not yet been contemplated. Consumers and corporate buyers already have online access to a staggering variety of goods and services from a wide range of merchants and service providers. They may electronically search through vast inventories to easily and conveniently find products to fit their needs, often at a significant savings over traditional commerce. They may also initiate and complete transactions online simply by identifying a product and submitting a payment identifier such as a credit card or purchasing account to the appropriate web site.
Electronic commerce also offers a number of advantages to the merchant or service provider. Offering products online avoids all of the overhead associated with operating retail or wholesale locations. In addition, online sellers do not need to anticipate the inventory needs of a number of different geographic locations. In fact, inventory may be centralized and precisely and automatically monitored and adjusted according to transaction data which are gathered virtually instantaneously. Moreover, the World Wide Web has the potential for making a particular seller's goods or services available to anyone, any time, anywhere on the planet. The cost savings and the market access associated with these advantages combine to give online sellers a significant competitive edge over their more traditional counterparts.
Given the obvious potential of electronic commerce and the rapidly increasing traffic at web sites engaging in electronic commcrce, it's no surprise that there is a demand for technical solutions by which electronic commerce transactions may be facilitated and made more efficient. Such solutions range from increasing the speed and efficiency with which data are transferred over the Internet to improving search engine capabilities to creating more user-friendly interfaces. Unfortunately, all of the solutions presented to date have not been able to reproduce an important part of traditional commerce and its attendant advantages for both sellers and buyers. That is, none of today's electronic commerce solutions allows for the give and take of a traditional negotiation between individual sellers and buyers.
An example of one solution for facilitating transactions between a buyer and one or more sellers is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,794,207 for METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CRYPTOGRAPHICALLY ASSISTED COMMERCIAL NETWORK SYSTEM DESIGNED TO FACILITATE BUYER-DRIVEN CONDITIONAL PURCHASE OFFER issued on Aug. 1, 1998, the entirety of which is incorporated herein by reference for all purposes. In that patent, a system is described by which a prospective buyer communicates a binding purchase offer globally to a plurality of sellers. The offer is made binding by requiring the buyer to submit a payment identifier such as, for example, a credit card. Any of the potential sellers may then bind the buyer by accepting the offer.
It is clear that such a solution does not resemble a traditional negotiation. In traditional situations, a prospective buyer can make a conditional offer which may be countered by the seller which may again be countered by the buyer. Traditionally, neither party is bound until both agree upon a price. In this way, the exact price may be identified at which a transaction could proceed as between the two specific parties. It will be understood that the ability to identify this price for any two parties in an efficient manner would be of potentially great value to both buyers and sellers. That is, buyers would be getting the product they want for the price they are willing to pay, while sellers would be effecting a greater number of sales due to their ability to engage in price discrimination.
There are, however, some attendant disadvantages associated with allowing buyers to submit non-biding bids. For example, if there are no consequences to the buyer for submitting a bid, many bids may be submitted by a single buyer or a small group of buyers solely for the purpose of manipulating the market for a particular product. Moreover, resources may be wasted by a seller in pursuing a proliferation of non-serious bids. As discussed above, one solution is to require that a buyer submit a credit card number before he may submit a bid, and further to assess some financial penalty against the buyer's credit card if the buyer abandons the negotiation. Unfortunately, this may serve as a barrier to entry for many buyers in that they are much less likely to conduct simultaneous negotiations with a number of merchants under these conditions.
It is therefore desirable to provide an electronic commerce solution by which individual buyers may negotiate online in a traditional and non-biding manner with one or more sellers.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
According to the present invention, an electronic commerce solution is provided for facilitating online transactions which allows traditional negotiation between a buyer and a seller to occur. According to a specific embodiment, a web site is provided having individual private graphical user interfaces, e.g., web pages, for buyers and sellers. A buyer gains access to his private interface with a user ID and password. The buyer's interface allows him to search a proprietary database for current product information for a variety of products being offered for sale by a number of sellers. The product information includes, for example, the name of the seller and an ask price and/or a list price for the product as specified by the seller. The buyer may save the product information for any products in which he is interested to one or more shopping lists which become part of his interface.
According to a specific embodiment, the buyer may share his shopping list(s) with friends or co-workers to solicit feedback on the various products, sellers, ask prices, etc. The shopping list may be sent in an e-mail as, for example, an HTML table in which the addressee may insert his comments. Alternatively, persons from whom feedback is desired may be notified by c-mail and given access to the buyer's shopping list on the web site itself. In this way, a buyer may solicit advice or approval before initiating a transaction.
For each product saved in the shopping list a bid button is provided, activation of which causes a bid interface to be presented by which the buyer may submit a non-binding bid to the seller of that particular product. Alternatively, the bid interface may be in the shopping list itself. According to a specific embodiment, the bid is made available to a number of different sellers offering the same product. The sellers are “different” in that they include a large number of independent economic entities. This is to be distinguished from other sites in which the “sellers” are all just representatives of a single economic entity. Making the bids available to different economic entities increases the likelihood that at least one of them can offer a price acceptable to the buyer. Using the shopping list, the buyer may make a number of bids for the same or different products to a number of different sellers simultaneously.
According to a specific embodiment of the invention, even though the buyer's bids are non-binding, there is nevertheless a consequence for submitting frivolous bids. That is, the transaction site of the present invention may be configured to track a buyer's “reputation” by tracking the buyer's transaction behavior. For example, the number of bids submitted by a particular
Ojha Purnendu Shekhar
Ortiz Rafael Gustavo
Schmidt Franklin Richard
Beyer Weaver & Thomas LLP
Coggins Wynn W.
Garg Y. C.
NexTag.com, Inc.
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