Message audit trail feature for facilitating electronic transactions

Abstract

An electronic commerce system provides various features for assisting customers in locating items and generating orders from a merchant's electronic catalog, and for assisting customers and merchants in communicating about such orders, A user-definable categories feature allows customers and/or merchants to define search queries for searching the electronic catalog, and to store these search queries under user-defined category names for subsequent use. An “active quote” feature allows the customer to view and modify quantities of items selected for prospective purchase throughout various catalog browsing or viewing modes. A message audit trail feature allows a customer and a merchant to send messages to one another that are linked to a particular order, and to view an order-specific log of such messages.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12 / 831,202, entitled MESSAGE AUDIT TRAIL FEATURE FOR FACILITATING ELECTRONIC TRANSACTIONS filed Jul. 6, 2010, which is a divisional of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11 / 380,628, entitled SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR GENERATING AND DISPLAYING MESSAGES ASSOCIATED WITH NEGOTIATED ORDERS, filed Apr. 27, 2006, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,752,079, which is a divisional of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09 / 607,841, entitled SYSTEM AND METHODS FOR BROWING A DATABASE OF ITEMS AND CONDUCTING ASSOCIATED TRANSACTIONS, filed Jun. 30, 2000, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,080,070, which claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60 / 142,287, entitled SYSTEM AND METHODS FOR FACILITATING BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS, filed Jul. 2, 1999, the entirety of which are incorporated herein by reference.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]In the field of Internet commerce, there are two major classifications ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0006]An “active quote” feature allows the customer to view and modify quantities of items selected for prospective purchase throughout the various browsing or viewing modes. Specifically, regardless of the browsing mode (alphabetic browsing, category-based browsing, search, etc.), whenever the user views an item or a list of items, each such item is displayed in conjunction with a “quantity” field which indicates the number of that item currently selected for purchase. Thus, when the user views an item, the user can immediately determine whether the item is selected for purchase (and its quantity) without having to access a shopping cart page or other special page.

[0007]A message audit trail feature allows a customer and a merchant to send messages to one another that are linked to a particular order, and to view an order-specific log of such messages. This feature may, for example, be used to facilitate negotiations between the customer and the merchant in connection with an order placed by the customer.

Problems solved by technology

In addition, each such order typically encompasses many different items, and relatively large quantities of such items.