Event-Centric Shopping Cart Automation
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
The existing online shopping systems require customers to manually search and select items for events, which is time-consuming and inefficient, especially with the increased volume of online transactions during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to a need for faster and more streamlined e-commerce processing.
Innovation Solution
An e-commerce system and method that shifts the item selection process from customer-controlled devices to merchant-controlled computers, allowing customers to select an event and input its size, with the system determining and presenting a list of associated items and quantities for an online shopping cart without further customer interaction during this process.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of time
If customers manually search and select items for events using traditional e-commerce methods, then customers have full control over item selection, but the process becomes time-consuming and inefficient
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by pre-configuring event templates with associated items and quantities before the customer arrives. When a customer selects an event type and size, the system has already prepared the item lists and quantity calculations, enabling instant presentation of the shopping cart without manual item-by-item selection during the transaction.
Solution Approach 2:
The system serves itself by automatically determining item lists and quantities based on event parameters without requiring customer interaction. The website computer autonomously processes event selection, calculates required item quantities based on event size, and populates the shopping cart, eliminating the need for customers to manually search and add each item.
2Productivity
If the system automatically determines items and quantities based on event selection, then transaction speed increases, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary configuration of event templates with pre-defined item associations and quantity rules before transactions occur. This advance preparation stores structured data relationships that enable rapid automatic determination during transactions without complex real-time calculations, thus increasing productivity while managing system complexity through pre-computation.
3Loss of information
If customers interact with the website for each item selection, then customization is maximized, but data load on merchant systems increases
Solution Approach 1:
The invention extracts the item selection and quantity determination functions from the customer interaction process and transfers them to the system's automatic processing. By removing these steps from customer-device interactions, the system reduces data transmission load and network traffic while maintaining customization through event-based templates that adapt to different event types and sizes without requiring detailed customer input for each item.
Data Source
AI summary
Disclosed is e-commerce processing for an event-centric online shopping transaction. The e-commerce processing involves receiving an identification or selection of an event from a device of a customer, and the disclosed methods and systems use the identified and/or selected event to populate, without item-related input from the customer, an online shopping cart with items for purchase in an e-commerce computing environment. The e-commerce processing can be accomplished without any party to the transaction having to add items to the online shopping cart on an item-by-item basis.