Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – Automated electrical financial or business practice or... – Finance
Reexamination Certificate
1999-11-10
2003-04-29
Olszewski, Robert P. (Department: 3627)
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
Finance
C705S026640
Reexamination Certificate
active
06556976
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an on-line shopping support method and system using communication networks, and more particularly to a method and system for transacting e-commerce and related data management, analysis, and reporting.
2. Description of the Related Art
Buyers in need of goods and services often spend considerable time locating an appropriate vendor. Buyers use trade publications, directories, recommendations, and other means to locate vendors. If the type of vendor needed is in a foreign country, the problem compounds. Vendors advertise through various media and by direct sales methods to make known to potential buyers what they sell and how to contact them. Once a buyer identifies a few vendors, each must be contacted to obtain product or service, price and availability information. This is a time consuming process and companies typically rely on experience purchasing staff to accomplish it. In addition, when buyers must sell surplus inventory from time to time, they must advertise, cold call, sell to brokers or the like. These processes are costly and time consuming for most businesses.
The prior art describes computerized shopping systems which employ some kind of central database of goods and services offered to buyers. Information about the goods and services offered is stored centrally and must be kept current centrally. The volume of information required to be maintained and updated in a central database system restricts it to a limited type or number of goods and services or number of vendors it can offer. It is not feasible for such systems to provide access to all standard goods and services and all suppliers world wide. For such a central database to exist, the amount of information to be stored would be awesome as would be the task of keeping it current. It simply is not feasible for central database systems to satisfy the need of buyers to receive timely quotes on an enormous variety of goods and services from vendors anywhere in the world. For this reason, existing centralized database systems are created and maintained by the one or few vendors whose goods and prices are displayed. These systems necessarily restrict a buyer's choice of vendors.
These systems are like electronic supermarkets which are owned by a single company or an association of suppliers. In such systems, a vendor provides its database of goods and/or services to a buyer who orders items from the vendor's database. It is analogous to walking into a vendors store and selecting items from the vendors available stock. Another such system is analogous to shopping in a mall. In this case a number of (complementary) vendors combine to offer their collective inventory to the buyer through individual databases or a combined database of available goods or services. In yet another existing system, a primary, seller, such as an insurance agency, offers to provide buyers premium quotations from the insurance carriers for which the agency is an agent.
In all of the above cases, the vendors responding to the buyers request regarding a particular good or service are either the service provider or a vendor with whom the service provider is involved in another business relationship such as advertisers in a common publication or affiliated insurance carrier. These select vendors provide the product and pricing information supplied by the system to buyers. These systems have no capacity to offer an unlimited number of goods and services from any number of vendors who wish to become members of the system. This would require an unrealistically large central database containing information about products, services and vendors. Each vendor would be required to provide detailed information to the central database about its product lines and would be required to update them daily. Accordingly, existing systems are very specialized electronic buying services with a limited selection of goods, services, and vendors. In addition, buyers wishing to sell surplus inventory from time to time cannot use these systems for that purpose.
In a conventional on-line shopping system using a personal computer based communication network or the like, a service offering side (or merchandise selling side) supplies merchandise information in response to a merchandise search request.
As on-line shopping using multimedia and networks prevails, a variety of merchandise such as daily necessities is sold on-line. Users buy a variety of merchandise at a considerable frequency through on-line shopping. In conventional on-line shopping, however, the service offering side provides merchandise information in a uniform menu style, and is unable to provide services suitable for user specific needs or conditions. On the service user side, merchandise information is searched by using a uniform menu. Therefore, as daily necessities or the like are bought at a considerable frequency, it can be anticipated some merchandise may sometimes be forgotten at the time of a purchase.
Several patents are illustrative of known technology for enabling a user to acquire goods or services while operating on-line. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,984,155, issued on Jan. 8, 1991 to Raymond R. Geier et al., describes a system for enabling a customer to operate a data terminal for placing an order for goods or services from a supplier, the data terminal displays information about the goods or services being ordered to complete, correct or update information available from the supplier's catalog.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,136,501, issued on Aug. 4, 1992 to David L. Silverman et al., describes a matching system for trading instruments in which bids are automatically matched against offers for given trading instruments for automatically providing matching transactions in order to complete trades for the given trading instruments, includes a host computer means comprising means for anonymously matching active bids and offers in the system by trading instrument based on a variable matching criteria, which comprises a counterpart credit limit between counterparts to a potential matching transaction.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,351,186, issued on Sep. 27, 1994 to Wayne J. Bullock et al. describes a system and method for obtaining information concerning a product or a service to a user which includes a remotely located source of computer-based information for generating and transmitting encoded data, including encoded audio data, pertaining to a plurality of products or services.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,493,490, issued on Feb. 20, 1996 to Jerome D. Johnson, describes an electronic system for creating customized product proposals stores a plurality of pictures and text segments to be used as building blocks in creating the proposal.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,664,115, issued on Sep. 2, 1997 to Richard Fraser, describes a method and apparatus for automatically matching, sellers of property with potential buyers through a communications network (preferably the Internet) in which a host system communicates with the sellers and the potential buyers over telephone or dedicated data transmission lines.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,717,989, issued on Feb. 10, 1998 to Guy Frederick Tozzoli et al., describes a system that stores criteria specified by a funder relating to trade transactions for buyers and sellers. The system compares the criteria with a proposed purchase order to determine whether the system can generate a payment guarantee on behalf of the funder for the buyer to the seller.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,758,328, issued on May 26, 1998 to Joseph Giovannoli, describes a computer system forming a computer based communications network of network members inclusive of network buyers and or network vendors for processing requests for quotation for goods and services through at least one central processing unit including operating system software for controlling the identification of network members, means for network buyers to generate request for quotation for goods and/or services, means for transmitting said request for quotation to said central proce
Fischer Andrew J.
Gershman, Brickner and Bratton, Inc.
Litman Richard C.
Olszewski Robert P.
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