BACKGROUND

1. Technical Field

The present disclosure relates to the technical field of providing and aggregating electronic commerce (“e-commerce”) benefit-conveying codes. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to a system and method of in-context automated delivery of e-commerce benefit-conveying codes during an online transaction.

2. Description of the Related Art

E-commerce companies often use benefit-conveying codes to encourage consumers to purchase specific products or to conduct a transaction on their website. Examples of benefit-conveying codes include coupon codes, discount codes, voucher codes, promotional codes, key codes, and so forth. One form of these benefit-conveying codes is alphanumerical text that can be entered into an input box during a stage or context of an online transaction, such as a shopping cart or a checkout stage on an e-commerce website. For the ease of discussion, hereinafter, Applicant uses “coupon codes” as examples of benefit-conveying codes to discuss issues applicable to benefit-conveying codes as existed in the conventional art. Conventionally, coupon codes can be obtained through e-commerce websites, email newsletters, social media, printed or mailed materials, or through coupon websites or blogs. Consumers often spend considerable amounts of time searching for coupon codes, which often occurs during their checkout process, directly before finalizing an online purchase.

Consumers often elect to utilize a search engine, such as Google®, to search for coupon codes. Most often coupon code directories will be found in these search results. In an attempt to address consumer need for locating coupons, large coupon directory websites, known as coupon aggregator websites, such as RetailMeNot® have attempted to aggregate and list valid coupons for many e-commerce websites across the Internet. While aggregator coupon web sites enhance the consumer's ability to find all coupons in one location, the consumer may still encounter numerous obstacles in the process of locating a useful and relevant coupon code.

First, a conventional coupon aggregator system does not usually closely work with or become incorporated into an e-commerce website to realize in-context automated delivery of coupon codes. As a result, a user (consumer) using a coupon aggregator system, upon visiting an e-commerce website, has to pause the user's contemporaneous e-commerce transaction while attempting to search and find coupon codes through the coupon aggregator system. Furthermore, even if locating one or more coupon codes through the coupon aggregator system, the consumer must either memorize or manually enter, or copy and paste, the code into a coupon input box during the shopping cart or checkout phase. This sequence of laboring of the user (away from the e-commerce website) not only greatly inconveniences and frustrates the user, but also in turn reduces the attraction of the coupon aggregator system to the user as a coupon code provider, thus hurting the business of coupon aggregator system built on providing coupon codes.

Next, a conventional coupon aggregator system, even if working closely with or incorporating into an e-commerce website, does not usually only provide coupon codes that have been checked to be reasonably relevant to the contemporaneous purchases (or, in other words, the current order) of a user in a shopping cart of an e-commerce website. Thus, even if the coupon aggregator system is able to provide a long list of coupon codes, the long list only aggravates the user's inconvenience and frustration when the user has to apply one coupon code after another only to realize that the applied coupon codes are not relevant to the user's contemporaneous purchases. This issue also hurts the business of coupon aggregator system built on providing coupon codes.

Further, two constant challenges of a coupon aggregator system are timely expanding its coupon code coverage to newly established e-commerce websites and timely updating and refreshing its coupon code collection of an e-commerce website. If a coupon aggregator system does not have effective means to timely expand coverage to e-commerce websites, the coupon aggregator system may very quickly lose its appeal to potential users. Since an e-commerce website can quickly roll out new coupon codes and render older coupon codes out-of-date, if a coupon aggregator system cannot timely update and refresh its coupon code collection of an e-commerce website to reflect changes or updates in coupon codes made by the e-commerce website, the coupon aggregator system may end up only providing users with out-of-date coupon codes. A conventional coupon aggregator system, on the other hand, does not have automated means to address both challenges based on user e-commerce activities or feedbacks, thus resulting in being unable to meet either challenge.

Therefore, there is a need to address some or all of the above-noted issues that conventional coupon aggregator systems are not able to effectively address.

BRIEF SUMMARY

In one aspect, the present disclosure provides a system and method of in-context automated delivery of relevance-checked benefit-conveying codes. In particular, the disclosed system and method provides means to incorporate a benefit-conveying code aggregator system into an e-commerce website on which a user is making contemporaneous online purchases, such that the aggregator system, via one or more client software modules, realize a seamless in-context of automated delivery of one or more benefit-conveying codes of the e-commerce website that are relevance-checked against the user's current pending order for the e-commerce website.

In another aspect, the disclosed system and method provides automated means to collect user feedback on one or more benefit-conveying codes of an e-commerce website and update benefit-conveying code collection of the e-commerce website stored on the backend system thereof, thereby timely updating and refreshing the benefit-conveying code collection of the e-commerce website stored in the backend system.

In yet another aspect, the disclosed system and method provides automated means to automatically (programmatically) detect an e-commerce website which has not been tracked (supported) for collecting benefit-conveying codes, and add the e-commerce website into the collection of the supported websites of the backend system thereof, such that the backend system expands its coverage to the e-commerce website for benefit-conveying code aggregation and provision.

In yet another aspect, the disclosed system and method provides means programmed and configured to perform relevance-check against candidate benefit-conveying codes of an e-commerce website such that only benefit-conveying codes checked to be possibly relevant to a user's current order are presented to the user for the user to select and apply against the e-commerce website. In one implementation, the resulting benefit-conveying codes are ranked and then presented and listed in an order of relevance so as to facilitate the user to select and apply benefit-conveying codes most relevant to the user's current order.

In yet another aspect, the disclosed system and method provides means programmed and configured to activate loading (acquiring) of benefit-conveying codes only in a context where a benefit-conveying code input field is present. This approach effectively avoids or maximally reduces unnecessary network traffic otherwise resulted from indiscrete activation of loading of benefit-conveying codes, thereby avoiding or maximally reducing unnecessary superficial disturbance of a user's online shopping experience.

