Integration Platform for Third-Party Channel Interfacing
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Merchants face difficulties in managing and configuring their electronic commerce platforms to integrate with multiple third-party channels and payment processors, leading to complex interactions and increased efforts in providing seamless shopping experiences, especially on mobile devices.
Innovation Solution
An integration platform provides a standardized interface for merchants to connect with electronic commerce platforms and payment processors, allowing them to offer products on multiple third-party channels with minimal effort, by authenticating and configuring access once, and handling transactions through a conduit-like service.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If merchants directly integrate with multiple third party channels and payment processors, then they can reach more customers and platforms, but the complexity of managing and configuring multiple interfaces increases significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an integration platform as an intermediary layer between merchants and multiple third-party channels. This platform provides standardized interfaces and handles the complexity of integrating with different payment processors and social media platforms, allowing merchants to reach multiple channels without directly managing each interface. The integration platform abstracts the complexity away from merchants while maintaining versatility in channel connectivity.
Solution Approach 2:
The integration platform is designed as a universal system that can connect to multiple different third-party channels and payment processors through standardized interfaces. Rather than requiring merchants to create separate integrations for each channel, the platform provides multi-functional capabilities that work across various platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) and payment processors, reducing the overall complexity for merchants.
2Ease of operation
If merchants configure each third party channel integration separately, then they can maintain precise control over each platform, but the time and effort required for configuration and setup increases
Solution Approach 1:
The integration platform performs preliminary configuration and authentication setup in advance. By establishing standardized connection protocols and pre-configuring interface templates for different third-party channels, the platform eliminates the need for merchants to perform time-consuming authentication and configuration for each channel separately. The preliminary setup work is done once at the platform level, then replicated across multiple channels.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent segments the integration configuration process into two distinct parts: platform-level standardized interface configuration and channel-specific instantiation. The complex authentication and interface setup is segmented out and handled at the integration platform level, while merchants only need to perform simple channel selection and basic parameters. This segmentation dramatically reduces the time and effort required for configuration.
3Productivity
If third party channels directly integrate with multiple electronic commerce platforms and payment processors, then they can support more transactions, but the difficulty of configuring interactions increases
Solution Approach 1:
The integration platform serves as an intermediary that third-party channels can use to access multiple electronic commerce platforms and payment processors. Rather than requiring third-party channels to directly configure and manage integrations with each commerce platform and payment processor, the integration platform handles these complex interactions through standardized interfaces, enabling third-party channels to support more transactions without proportionally increasing configuration difficulty.
Data Source
AI summary
An integration platform provides a third party channel products from a merchant, so that the third party channel may cause an opportunity to be presented to a user to purchase one of the products. In response to an indication of a user purchase, the integration platform transmits a purchase request to the electronic commerce platform to create an order for the purchase. The integration platform may create a payment for the purchase with the merchant's payment processor and transmit the payment to the payment processor, update the order with the merchant's electronic commerce platform with the payment information, update the status of the order to shipped, and capture payment information by communicating with the payment provider. The merchant's electronic commerce platform may then update the order with the integration platform, which may notify the third party channel of the update so that update may be communicated to the user.