Item Ranking Across Merchants Using Attribute Data
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Solution Overview
Problem
Users face inefficiencies in finding and selecting merchants, such as restaurants, that meet their needs due to the time-consuming process of sifting through numerous options on online websites and mobile applications, which do not effectively utilize item-level information to rank and recommend merchants based on factors like cost, delivery time, and ratings.
Innovation Solution
A service provider processes item-level information to rank specified items across multiple merchants, considering factors like preparation time, courier transport time, cost, ratings, and calories, and presents this information to users through electronic devices, allowing them to efficiently identify and order from suitable merchants.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If users manually search through merchants on online websites or mobile applications, then they can find merchants that satisfy their needs, but they spend relatively large amounts of time sifting through the merchants
Solution Approach 1:
The system pre-processes and analyzes item-level information from multiple merchants before the user searches. Merchants are pre-ranked based on factors like delivery time, cost, and ratings, so when a user searches for a specific item, the results are already optimized and ready for immediate display, eliminating the need for users to manually sift through unsorted merchant lists
Solution Approach 2:
The patent replaces the manual mechanical process of users sifting through merchant lists with an automated computational system. The service provider's system automatically collects, processes, and ranks merchant information based on item-level data, substituting human manual searching with algorithm-driven automated ranking and presentation of optimized results
2Loss of information
If online websites and mobile applications provide a map or list of merchants, then users can view available merchants, but the information is not effectively organized to help users quickly identify suitable options
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies different organizational treatments to different aspects of merchant information based on user needs. Instead of presenting all merchant data uniformly, it highlights specific item-level attributes (delivery time, cost, ratings) relevant to the searched item, giving different weights and visibility to different information qualities based on their importance to the user's specific search context
Solution Approach 2:
The system pre-organizes merchant information by collecting and analyzing item-level data from multiple merchants before the user search occurs. This preliminary processing ranks merchants based on relevant factors, so when users search, the information is already structured and sorted to facilitate quick identification of suitable options, rather than presenting raw unprocessed data
Data Source
AI summary
Item-level information of a particular item may be processed to categorize the particular item. In some instances, the particular item may be ranked across multiple merchants that are offering the particular item for acquisition. The ranking may be based on the item-level information that relates to an attribute of the particular item for the individual merchants. For example, the item-level information may include a cost of the particular item at a merchant, a rating of the particular item for a merchant, a number of calories of the particular item for a merchant, and so on. Information regarding the ranking may be displayed or otherwise output to enable the user to identify and order the particular item from a merchant that satisfies the user's needs.