Digital Wallet Broadcasting via Customer-Merchant Key Coupling
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Solution Overview
Problem
Consumers face difficulties during offline shopping due to lack of accurate information on product quality, brands, prices, and user evaluations, and struggle with finding suitable gifts, as they often cannot easily access professional opinions from store sales clerks who are familiar with their individual preferences.
Innovation Solution
A customer-merchant key coupling system is established through a payment provider, allowing consumers to create a shopping profile with preferences and restrictions, enabling merchants to provide personalized assistance during shopping and payment processing via wireless communication, using unique customer and merchant keys for secure and convenient transactions.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If consumers use traditional payment methods (cash, check, credit card) during offline shopping, then payment can be completed, but security risks increase due to possibility of losing cash or credit card forgeries
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a payment provider as an intermediary between consumers and merchants. The payment provider's server acts as a mediator that handles payment processing, allowing consumers to make payments without directly exposing their payment information to merchants or carrying physical payment instruments, thereby reducing security risks
2Ease of operation
If consumers wander about in the store without assistance, then they can browse freely, but they lack accurate information on product quality, brands, prices, and user evaluations
Solution Approach 1:
The system establishes two-way communication between consumers and merchants through the payment provider's server. Consumers can send inquiries about products, and merchants can provide feedback with accurate information on quality, brands, prices, and user evaluations, enabling informed decision-making while maintaining shopping freedom
3Loss of information
If consumers approach store clerks for shopping advice, then they can obtain professional opinions, but it becomes awkward and cumbersome to explain their needs
Solution Approach 1:
The payment provider's server serves as an intermediary communication channel between consumers and merchants. Consumers can send detailed shopping requirements and preferences through the system without needing to personally approach clerks, making the communication process more convenient and less awkward while still accessing professional knowledge
4Reliability
If a customer-merchant key coupling system is implemented, then personalized assistance and secure payment are enabled, but device and system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The payment provider's server performs multiple functions including key management, communication facilitation, payment processing, and information exchange. By consolidating these functions into a single multi-functional system, the patent reduces the need for multiple separate complex components while maintaining security and personalization capabilities
Data Source
AI summary
A service provider generates a customer key and a merchant key for facilitating efficient provision of assistance, by the merchant, with the customer's shopping and payment, via customer-merchant key coupling. When a customer approaches or enters a merchant's store the customer has signed up with, the user device carried by the customer wirelessly broadcasts a signal for the customer key unique to the merchant key. When the merchant server picks up the signal, the service provider communicates to the merchant server information in the user's profile including identifiers, shopping preferences, or the shopping history of the customer, subject to any user-created restrictions contained in the profile so that a sales clerk of the store may approach the customer to give recommendations, suggestions, or other assistance with shopping, based on the information.