Offer Processing System for Real-Time Chain Tracking
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional systems fail to effectively promote and distribute merchant offers to consumers over communications or social networks, often resulting in unawareness of available incentives and inefficient marketing campaigns.
Innovation Solution
A cloud-based offer processing system that aggregates and applies offers to transactions in real-time, eliminating the need for user activation and reducing processing and storage resources by integrating with third-party payment and merchant systems, while enabling offer sharing between users and utilizing a blockchain for secure value distribution.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If conventional systems are used to distribute merchant offers to consumers, then the system structure is simple, but the offer distribution effectiveness is poor and consumers remain unaware of available incentives
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a social network platform as an intermediary to distribute merchant offers to consumers. The system integrates with existing social networks to leverage their established user base and communication channels, ensuring reliable offer distribution without building a complex distribution infrastructure from scratch. This intermediary approach resolves the contradiction by achieving effective offer delivery through partnership rather than direct implementation.
Solution Approach 2:
The system is designed to work across multiple platforms including social networks, mobile devices, and web browsers. By creating a universal offer distribution mechanism that functions across different channels and devices, the patent achieves reliable offer delivery without requiring separate specialized systems for each platform, thus maintaining relative system simplicity while improving distribution effectiveness.
2Productivity
If offers require user activation in conventional systems, then the system operation is simple, but user engagement is low and marketing effectiveness is reduced
Solution Approach 1:
The system pre-loads and pushes offers to users through social network notifications and mobile device alerts before users actively search for them. By performing the offer delivery action in advance and proactively presenting offers to users, the system eliminates the need for users to manually activate or search for offers, thereby maintaining operational simplicity while significantly improving marketing effectiveness through increased user exposure and engagement.
Solution Approach 2:
The system automatically manages offer distribution, tracking, and redemption without requiring manual user activation. The offer processing system handles matching, delivery, and validation autonomously, reducing user burden while improving marketing effectiveness through consistent and reliable offer delivery across the user base.
3Reliability
If a blockchain system is implemented for tracking offer chains, then offer distribution reliability is improved, but processing and storage resources increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the blockchain implementation into selective components, applying blockchain technology only to critical offer chain tracking functions rather than the entire system. By dividing the system into modular components and applying distributed ledger technology only where needed for offer validation and tracking, the patent achieves reliable offer chain tracking while minimizing the overall processing and storage resource requirements compared to a full blockchain implementation.
4Loss of information
If offers are widely distributed through social networks, then consumer awareness increases, but tracking and managing offer chains becomes more complex
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements automated feedback mechanisms that track offer delivery, user interactions, and redemption status across social network distributions. By establishing real-time feedback loops that automatically report offer chain status back to the central processing system, the patent achieves comprehensive consumer awareness through widespread distribution while managing tracking complexity through automated information collection and validation rather than manual processes.
Data Source
AI summary
An offer processing system is configured to receive transaction data associated with user purchases from third party point of sales devices and/or third party payment processing systems. The offer processing system may then identify offers or savings that are applicable to the transaction data and redeem the offers on behalf of the users.