1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to online sales and marketing, and, more specifically, to online sales during online purchase on the Internet.
2. Related Art
The past ten years have seen tremendous growth in online Internet sales. Integration of key sales functions into sales software and hardware systems account for much of the penetration of online sales systems by manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. As buyers become more comfortable with Internet and online credit card processing, and begin to appreciate the associated ease and benefits of online purchasing, online sales revenues should experience exceptional growth. For 1998, online sales reached approximately 60 billion dollars in revenue, while projections for 2003 anticipate over 1.4 trillion. Corporate buyers and sellers generate over 90% of such revenues.
Conventional sales systems, such as (1) sales or shopping robot (“shopping bot” or “sales bot”) systems, (2) purported instant rebate and coupon systems, (3) auctioning systems, (4) parallel web hosted systems, (5) custom sales channel software development, etc., however, are deficient in many respects and offer only partial solutions. For example, the above systems require an excessive investment of human labor for operation, suffer from inherent and significant deficiencies in performance, and have difficulties in collecting revenue.
More specifically, shopping bots act as a front end to the sales process by attempting to assist an individual buyer in comparison shopping of items across sellers on the web. Shopping bots require human intensive interaction not only in setting up an interface to each seller's site, but also in the ongoing maintenance of each interface to each seller's site. Shopping bots attempt to read and process information from the web pages of each seller's site which are often changed or deleted or moved to a differing URL. Shopping bots also fail to identify new products at each seller's site without having an employee revisit the seller's site, revisit all the links there, identify new URL's and associated new web page content, and formulate new interfaces thereto.
Without (and often in spite of) sufficient employee interaction, shopping bots will and do suffer from providing incorrect, incomplete and outdated information. Shopping bots also (1) fail to provide interfaces with underlying seller product information, e.g., further database information involved in the selection process only available during buyer purchasing, hypertext linked (“nested”) product information, etc., (2) fail to provide interfaces with underlying, backend database information, e.g., inventory, restocking schedules, etc., (3) cannot determine whether or not a purchase was made, making it difficult to collect revenues, (4) cannot perform credit card transaction processing, (5) cannot handle order fulfillment, and so on.
Purported online, instant coupons and rebate sites also suffer with many of the same deficiencies. For example, without human intervention, no mechanisms exist for (1) verifying that a manufacturer's rebate or coupon applies to an independent retailer's offering; (2) instantly applying such rebates or coupons; (3) placing control in the manufacturer for designating or modifying the number of distributed and/or applied coupons or rebates in real time; and (4) advertising a rebate or coupon on any web server selected by the manufacturer with processing through another. Thus, purported instant coupon and rebate sites require human intensive processing, and merely vector buyers to sellers' publicly offered web pages that indicate, in a poor attempt at mimicking instant processing, that a coupon is being applied.
Online auction systems also suffer from many of the same problems. Among such problems, and perhaps most importantly, conventional online auction systems fail to provide sufficient integration with sellers to enable automated, effective use of auctioning as a vehicle to “dump” excess or discontinued inventory or for promotional purposes.
Custom software development within a wholly controlled sales channel provides a costly approach for exchanging product information, pricing, etc. When the sales channel is not wholly controlled, such information is difficult if not impossible to collect. For example, a manufacture may not be able to afford the cost of integrating with a plurality of distributors and retailers that also sell other manufacturers' goods, wherein each use significantly different sales systems that often change.
Many other problems and disadvantages associated with prior systems will become apparent to one of skill in the art upon review of such prior systems and in light of the teachings herein.