Social Commerce Micro Catalog System for Affiliate Referral Tracking
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current social marketing systems lack the ability to provide users with a customized subset of a merchant's products and face challenges in real-time integration with merchant sites, leading to inefficient referral tracking, reporting, and payment processing, as well as a lack of simplified integration between merchant websites, affiliate networks, and social media environments.
Innovation Solution
A method and system for managing catalog resources within a social commerce environment, where users are referred to a customized social commerce storefront associated with an affiliate, featuring a micro catalog of purchasable products, with social and catalog data processed to generate product catalog data, including keyword and theme data, which is provided to users through a user interface, allowing for real-time integration and enhanced user experience.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If a link from social media environment to merchant's home page is provided, then user referral tracking is enabled, but the user cannot access a customized subset of products
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a social commerce marketplace system as an intermediary layer between social media environments, affiliate networks, and merchant websites. This mediator provides real-time integration capabilities, enabling users to access customized product subsets through social media referrals without requiring direct complex integrations between all components. The system handles catalog resource management, user data processing, and referral tracking centrally.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent segments the merchant's master catalog into customized subsets (micro catalogs) for different users based on their social media profiles and preferences. Each user receives a personalized product subset through their affiliate's social commerce storefront, allowing customized product access while maintaining a single integrated system that manages the complexity of segmentation across multiple platforms.
2Productivity
If traditional referral tracking methods are used, then integration requirements are minimized, but real-time integration and enhanced user experience are not achieved
Solution Approach 1:
The social commerce marketplace system performs multiple functions within a single integrated platform: it manages catalog resources, processes user social data, generates customized product subsets, tracks referrals in real-time, and handles payment processing. This multi-functional approach improves productivity by consolidating operations while managing integration complexity through a centralized architecture that handles all these functions.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements real-time feedback loops where user interactions with customized products are tracked, analyzed, and used to refine future recommendations. Referral tracking receives real-time data from social media environments and merchant websites, processing this information to provide immediate feedback on campaign performance and user behavior, thereby improving tracking efficiency dynamically.
3Ease of operation
If a link to predetermined product page is provided, then referral tracking is simplified, but the user cannot receive customized product recommendations
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary processing of user social data and catalog resources in advance to pre-generate customized product subsets. By pre-processing and preparing personalized catalog subsets before the user arrives, the system reduces real-time processing delays and can present customized products immediately upon referral, thereby minimizing time loss while maintaining personalization.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements dynamic catalog resource management where the product catalog is not static but adapts in real-time based on user profiles, social media data, and contextual information. This dynamic approach allows the system to generate customized product subsets on-demand while using caching and pre-processing techniques to minimize processing time, balancing personalization with speed.
Data Source
AI summary
A method and system are disclosed for managing catalog resources within a social commerce environment. Users are referred by a plurality of affiliates to a social commerce marketplace system. Once referred, the users are presented with a customized social commerce storefront that is associated with an individual affiliate. Each of the customized social commerce storefronts comprises a micro catalog of purchasable products, which is a subset of a master catalog comprising a set of available products. Social data associated with the user and catalog data associated with the purchasable products is processed to generate product catalog data to the user, which is then provided to the user. The user reviews the social commerce content and selects individual purchasable products for purchase.