Cloud Intermediary for Multi-Retailer Price Comparison
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Solution Overview
Problem
As the quantity of content on the Internet grows, users face difficulty in easily integrating and comparing information from multiple commercial and retail sites, leading to a need for a system that provides value-added content in a single, convenient interface.
Innovation Solution
A system architecture that utilizes a third-party cloud to facilitate communication between electronic retailers and end-users, allowing for the interception and translation of communications streams to provide value-added content, including price comparisons, product information, and other features, through a visual generator that creates display regions for enhanced user experience.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If users access multiple commercial and retail sites to compare information, then they can find comprehensive content, but the complexity of integration and comparison increases significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a comparison shopping service as an intermediary system that sits between users and multiple retail sites. This service automatically retrieves, integrates, and compares product information from various sources, presenting consolidated results to users. The intermediary handles the complexity of multi-site integration internally while providing a simplified interface to users, thus resolving the contradiction between comprehensive content access and operational simplicity.
Solution Approach 2:
The comparison shopping service is designed as a universal platform that can interface with multiple different retail sites and provide various comparison functions simultaneously. Rather than requiring users to manually access each site separately, the universal service aggregates information from diverse sources through a single access point, enabling comprehensive content integration without increasing user complexity.
2Ease of operation
If a single interface integrates content from multiple retailers, then user convenience improves, but the system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The comparison shopping service acts as an intermediary layer that abstracts the complexity of multi-retailer integration from the user interface. It handles communications with multiple retailers through standardized protocols and presents unified results to users, thereby improving ease of operation while containing system complexity within the intermediary layer rather than exposing it to users.
Solution Approach 2:
The system architecture is segmented into distinct functional components: a user interface layer for convenience, an intermediary comparison service layer for integration logic, and retailer interface layers for data acquisition. This segmentation allows the complex integration tasks to be isolated in the intermediary layer while maintaining a simple user-facing interface, thus improving ease of operation without requiring the entire system to be overly complex.
Data Source
AI summary
A public cloud can host a multi-network service for transceiving common requests and responses for multiple networks. The public cloud can receive requests from the networks to join the service via an application programming interface (API). The public cloud can receive a request from a client device for information from one of the networks via the service, and the public cloud can transmit the request to that network and corresponding request(s) to one or more other networks joined to the service. The public cloud provider can receive multiple responses to the request and corresponding request(s), and transmit the responses to the client device.