Centralized Payment Service for Cross-Merchant Preference Propagation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Merchants face challenges in customizing customer experiences across different locations, as they lack information about customers' preferences when they visit different merchants, leading to inconsistent service.
Innovation Solution
A payment service that collects and propagates customers' item preferences across merchants, associating these preferences with user profiles and intelligently sharing them with relevant merchants to enhance customer experiences.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If merchants rely on local customer data only, then service customization at individual locations is simple, but customer experience consistency across different merchants deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a payment service as an intermediary that collects customer preferences from multiple merchants and propagates them back to merchants. This intermediary system enables information sharing across the merchant network without requiring direct complex connections between all merchants, thus improving customer experience consistency while managing system complexity through centralized coordination.
Solution Approach 2:
The payment service performs multiple functions: it authorizes payment instruments for transactions and simultaneously collects, stores, and propagates customer preferences. By making the payment service universal and multi-functional, the patent avoids adding separate dedicated systems for preference management, thereby improving customer experience consistency without proportionally increasing overall system complexity.
2Adaptability or versatility
If merchants collect and store customer preferences locally, then service customization improves, but information loss across different merchants increases
Solution Approach 1:
The payment service implements a feedback mechanism where customer preferences collected from one merchant are propagated back to other merchants through the centralized system. This feedback loop ensures that preference information gathered at any point in the network becomes available to all relevant merchants, maintaining service customization capability while preventing information loss across the merchant ecosystem.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary collection and storage of customer preferences at the payment service before transactions occur at different merchants. By having preferences pre-collected and stored in the centralized payment service, the system ensures that preference information is available when needed at any merchant location, thus maintaining adaptability while reducing information loss through advance preparation.
Data Source
AI summary
This disclosure describes, in part, techniques for collecting item preferences of users at a centralized location and propagating these item preferences to users and merchants in an intelligent manner. In some instances, the centralized location is a payment service that functions to both authorize payment instruments of users for costs of transactions conducted at the merchant, and collect and propagate the item preferences to the merchants and the users.