Merchant Benchmarking Tool for Peer Sales Comparison
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Solution Overview
Problem
Merchants face difficulties in quantitatively evaluating their sales performance compared to their peers due to lack of access to comprehensive purchasing histories and trends across multiple merchants, hindering effective evaluation of marketing and payment programs.
Innovation Solution
A computer-implemented method that accumulates data from cashless sales transactions across multiple merchants, calculates percentage changes in sales categories, and generates reports to compare a merchant's sales growth with that of peers, providing insights into sales performance, market share, and customer metrics.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If merchants collect and analyze point of sale information from their own transactions, then they can understand their own sales performance, but they cannot quantitatively evaluate how their sales compare to peer merchants
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary system (the benchmarking tool and data aggregation platform) that collects, anonymizes, and processes purchasing data from multiple merchants. This intermediary enables merchants to access peer performance data without directly sharing sensitive customer information, thus resolving the contradiction between needing peer comparison data and maintaining data privacy/security.
Solution Approach 2:
The system creates a universal data aggregation platform that serves multiple merchants simultaneously. By pooling data from numerous merchants across different categories and locations, the system provides each individual merchant with access to relevant peer benchmarks, enabling quantitative comparison that would be impossible for any single merchant to achieve alone.
2Measurement precision
If merchants access comprehensive purchasing histories across multiple merchants, then they can evaluate sales performance relative to peers, but they face challenges in organizing and making this information relevant to their specific consumer base
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the aggregated peer data into relevant categories and subsets that match the specific merchant's consumer base characteristics. By dividing the comprehensive purchasing histories into manageable, relevant segments (e.g., by demographic, purchase behavior, product category), the system makes the data accessible and actionable without overwhelming complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The system applies local quality by tailoring the presented peer data to match the specific characteristics of each merchant's consumer base. Rather than providing generic peer comparisons, the system filters and organizes data to show comparisons that are locally relevant to each merchant's specific market, customer demographic, and business context.
3Ease of operation
If merchants lack access to organized information about sales within their market, then they cannot effectively evaluate marketing and payment programs, but collecting such information from multiple sources increases system complexity
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary action by pre-aggregating, organizing, and processing peer sales data before merchants need to access it. The data is collected, cleaned, categorized, and made ready for comparison in advance, so when merchants want to evaluate their marketing programs, the relevant organized information is already available without them needing to build complex data collection systems themselves.
Data Source
AI summary
A benchmarking tool generates reports for delivery to a merchant illustrating a performance of the merchant as compared to the performance of the merchant's peers. The performance is illustrated through metrics that algorithmically combine data on transactions of consumers with the merchant or its peers, respectively. The metrics may be further subdivided into consumer groups such as new consumers, consumers that have shopped within the merchant in the past, consumers that no longer shop within the merchant, or consumers that use a commercial account to pay for purchases. The reports may be rendered in a graphical display for use by the merchant.