Intermediary System for Shopping Data Synchronization
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Solution Overview
Problem
The existing shopping systems face challenges in providing seamless and synchronized shopping experiences across physical stores and their associated websites, as prices and inventory can differ, leading to inconsistencies and potential customer dissatisfaction.
Innovation Solution
A network architecture that enables indirect communication between personal devices and store servers via an intermediary system, allowing requests to be routed through the intermediary for responses from various systems, including shopping list providers, loyalty systems, and payment systems, ensuring consistent and integrated shopping experiences.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Speed
If direct communication between personal devices and store servers is implemented, then communication speed and simplicity are improved, but system security and data consistency across multiple stores are compromised
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a centralized server as an intermediary between personal devices and store-specific servers. This intermediary receives requests from personal devices, routes them to appropriate store servers, and consolidates responses. This resolves the contradiction by maintaining fast direct communication between devices and servers while ensuring data consistency through centralized coordination, as the intermediary manages price and inventory synchronization across multiple stores.
2Measurement precision
If multiple store-specific servers are used to handle local shopping requests, then store-specific promotions and inventory accuracy are improved, but system complexity and synchronization difficulty increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the system into a centralized coordination server and multiple independent store-specific servers. Each store server handles local inventory and promotions independently, maintaining high inventory accuracy for its specific store. The centralized server manages the overall system complexity by providing a unified interface and coordinating between stores, thus resolving the contradiction between store-specific precision and overall system simplicity.
Solution Approach 2:
The centralized server performs multiple functions: routing requests, consolidating responses, synchronizing prices and promotions, and managing communication protocols. This multi-functional approach handles the complexity centrally, allowing individual store servers to remain simple while maintaining accurate local inventory data, thus resolving the contradiction between inventory precision and system complexity.
3Reliability
If real-time price and promotion synchronization across all stores is implemented, then customer satisfaction is improved, but communication overhead and processing time increase
Solution Approach 1:
The centralized server acts as an intermediary that efficiently manages price and promotion synchronization. It receives updates from any store, validates them against the centralized database, and propagates changes to relevant stores only when necessary. This approach maintains price consistency across all stores while minimizing unnecessary communication overhead and reducing synchronization time by avoiding blanket updates to all stores for every price change.
Data Source
AI summary
The disclosure presents a network, system, method and computer readable medium for using a personal device when shopping at a store using the server associated with this store. As described in the disclosure, the communication between the personal device and the store server is indirect via an intermediary system.