초록 ▼

A system and method for conducting commerce over a distributed network manage merchant and product information in an electronic shopping basket, payment source information in an electronic wallet, and shipping address information in an electronic address book, all of such information being stored on

A system and method for conducting commerce over a distributed network manage merchant and product information in an electronic shopping basket, payment source information in an electronic wallet, and shipping address information in an electronic address book, all of such information being stored on a consumer computer. A commerce client running on the consumer computer is configured as a MIME handler and extends the functionality of a standard Web browser to support computer-based shopping. A merchant site Web server provides HTML-coded Web documents which describe merchant products and which host computer-based shopping options. The HTML-coded Web documents contain function-calling information by which consumer-selected options invoke shopping-related functions on either the merchant (server) computer or the consumer (client) computer. A consumer selects the options from within the Web browser to initiate shopping-related operations such as: retrieve product information from merchants on the World Wide Web, selectively store product information locally on the consumer computer, locally compare product information from different merchants, locally store payment source and shipping address information and selectively forward such information to merchant sites, order products from Web-based merchants, track the status of purchase orders, and receive instructional information on application usage.

대표청구항 ▼

[ What is claimed is:] [1.] A client architecture for conducting electronic commerce over the Internet, comprising, on a computer-readable medium:a Web browser configured to run on a computer;a commerce client application configured to run on the computer in conjunction with the Web browser applicat

[ What is claimed is:] [1.] A client architecture for conducting electronic commerce over the Internet, comprising, on a computer-readable medium:a Web browser configured to run on a computer;a commerce client application configured to run on the computer in conjunction with the Web browser application to provide a user interface, the commerce client application including a callable function, said callable function comprising executable computer instructions stored on a computer storage medium accessible by the computer;an electronic shopping basket object configured to access and manipulate product information and merchant information stored on the computer storage medium, the access and manipulation initiated by executing the callable function of the commerce client application;at least two Web documents, each of which includes embedded function-calling information that corresponds to the callable function of the commerce client application, the function-calling information embedded within the Web document such that a user can selectively initiate the execution of the callable function via the user interface while viewing one of the Web documents with the Web browser; andwherein the user interface is displayed for each of the Web documents and functions independently of the Web documents.