Abstract:
Creating and displaying a repeat customer transaction counter showing a current cumulative count of repeat transactions for an individual seller at a market venue. The seller registers and identifies his/her self-verified existing repeat transaction count and/or uploads a file of historical transaction information to create a starting count. The seller is next sent HTML text for the display of the seller&#39;s unique repeat customer transaction counter. The cumulative count is continually incremented by subsequent transactions concluded by prior buyers. The counter image is presented in response to a call from the HTML text placed by the seller on a web page at a market venue or in an HTML enabled email sent to the buyer. The counter shows a cumulative repeat transaction count, indicating prior buyer trust in the seller, as evidenced by repeat purchases. Alternatively, a clock shows the elapsed time since the last repeat transaction.

Description:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION  
       [0001]     1. Field of the Invention  
         [0002]     This invention relates generally to systems and methods for enhancing trust in retail sales. This invention is particularly well suited for auctions or fixed price purchases executed at a market venue web site over networks including the Internet.  
         [0003]     2. Description of the Background  
         [0004]     Online transactions, like those generally conducted at eBay, Amazon and other such market venues, occur only after a seller can establish a measure of trust with a potential buyer. Buyers will not conduct transactions if they do not trust the unseen seller. This dynamic was emphasized by eBay&#39;s CEO Meg Whitman in an article for PC World magazine in 2001, where she was quoted as saying: “Trust and safety are at the core of eBay.” Systems that improve buyer trust are critical to online venues&#39; success and to the success of individual sellers on these venues or sellers selling from their own e-commerce sites.  
         [0005]     eBay, and all such market venue sites, provide a forum for buyers and sellers to conduct transactions. To help facilitate these transactions, multiple signals of trust are exhibited on the market venue&#39;s web selling pages. Examples of these trust signals include colored stars indicating seller levels such as “power seller”, “gold power seller” and the like. Furthermore, market venues provide a mechanism for buyers and seller to leave each other feedback. Feedback is usually positive, negative or neutral. Often, a market venue will allow for prominent display of the counts of total feedback scores and will show positive feedback scores as an important signal of trust for future buyers.  
         [0006]     Academic papers, including “Trust Among Strangers in Internet Transactions: Empirical Analysis of eBay&#39;s Reputation System”, by Paul Resnick, and Richard Zeckhauser, have analyzed the importance of trust in online retail transactions and specifically the importance of signals of trust on eBay. Their paper exams the eBay feedback system and reviews its major drawbacks. The paper makes the point that: “Customer-scored reputation systems to date rely overwhelmingly on voluntarily provided information. This creates strong incentives to free ride, and quite possibly to Pollyanna (disproportionately positive) feedback.” The paper makes clear that the eBay feedback system is a critical element to eBay&#39;s success but is not without its drawbacks.  
         [0007]     Additionally, various forms of certification marks have been developed by non-profit and for-profit entities to relay a measure of trust on market venue sites or e-commerce sites. These organizations, such as: BBBOnline, TRUSTe, WebAssured, SquareTrade, PayPal, CPAwebTrust and ReliableMerchants; all provide some level of a certification program that indicate a code of business standards or practices which sellers use to advertise or promotes trust for the seller. Once certified, the seller is given permission to display a certification image on the seller&#39;s item listing web page at the market venue. Generally, these certification programs provide a minimal level of trust since most have little, if any, independent verification.  
         [0008]     Perhaps the most concrete form of trust between a buyer and a seller in retail transactions manifests itself when an individual buyer makes a repeat purchase with the same seller. Repeat purchases signal that a buyer trusts the seller enough to spend more of their own money and time with the seller. Considering the minimal “cost” of leaving positive feedback on a market venue site, a repeat purchase is clearly a superior demonstration of buyer trust. A market venue buyer incurs only a few seconds of time and no cash expenditure to leave positive feedback for a seller on a market venue such as eBay. Buyers considering leaving feedback may actually have a significant disincentive for leaving negative feedback since seller retaliation could also lead to a negative feedback score on the buyer&#39;s account.  
         [0009]     On the other hand, repeat purchases require the buyer to seek out the seller&#39;s other listings, and then spend time reviewing the seller&#39;s offered listings, and finally, the buyer must commit money to conclude a repeat transaction with the seller. This expense in time and money provides a significantly high hurdle and signals greater trust by the buyer.  
         [0010]     To efficiently signal prior buyer trust in a seller, the signals of trust must be easily viewed and understandable by the buyer during the buyer&#39;s purchase evaluation. Thus, it is critical that the buyer easily see and understand any trust signal offered by the seller. The eBay colored stars and positive feedback scores provide evidence of simple to understand and easily viewed trust signals. The positive feedback score in particular has proven effective in relaying trust. It is calculated by dividing the positive feedback received by the seller over the total feedback received by the seller. Thus, a high positive feedback score of 99.5%, for example, quickly relays to a potential buyer that the seller has a strong positive track record with initial sales—thus signaling a measure of trust and facilitating the transaction. However, this feedback score does not relay anything about the more concrete measure of repeat purchase transactions from prior buyers.  
       SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION  
       [0011]     Accordingly, several objects and advantages of my invention are providing any number, or type, of market venue sellers with a simple, readily understandable system to obtain a fair count of their own repeat customer transactions and to display that count on the seller&#39;s item selling web-pages or within outbound emails. The repeat customer counter further signals a significantly high level of prior buyer trust in the demonstrating seller.  
         [0012]     The invention operates on the premise that capturing repeat transactions and displaying the seller&#39;s cumulative history of repeat transactions to new buyers will help increase the trust level for pending buyers and facilitate the completion of future transactions for the seller.  
         [0013]     The preferred embodiments of the present invention provides a system and method for enabling an auction or fixed-price seller, referred to herein as the “seller,” to display an updated counter of the seller&#39;s repeat customer transactions on a web-page or within an email. This displayed repeat customer transaction counter acts as a signal of trust to viewing buyers.  
         [0014]     After establishing the seller&#39;s account, including the establishment of existing repeat customer transactions by self-verification or through the uploading of completed transaction records, the system provides the seller with HTML text to display the seller&#39;s repeat customer transaction counter. In the preferred embodiment, this is provided via email. Subsequently, the system automatically receives transaction information for the seller from the seller&#39;s market venue or ecommerce web site. Received transactions are evaluated by a software program to determine if the buyer in the transaction is a prior buyer. When a repeat buyer transaction is identified, the system increments a cumulative counter of existing repeat transactions in the system&#39;s database. If the transaction is determined to be a new transaction, no increment is recorded but the new buyer user ID is recorded in the database for future comparison.  
         [0015]     This system and method is comprised of a repeat customer counter registration by the seller. Seller registration occurs by providing the seller with access to a registration software program on a web server where the seller can initiate their repeat customer counter. The registration software updates a seller database which includes, but is not limited to, seller information including seller name, seller&#39;s market user ID, address, active/inactive status, billing information, as well the market venue the seller sells through and/or the web address of the seller&#39;s own store web site. In addition, each seller record in the seller database includes an updated count of cumulative repeat purchases.  
         [0016]     The seller initiates the repeat customer counter system by updating and completing HTML forms within the repeat customer counter web site. Since the seller will most likely have been in business prior to registration, during seller registration the seller may optionally enter a self-certified count of existing repeat customer transactions. The self-certified count of repeat transactions becomes the starting point for the cumulative count of existing repeat transactions in the seller record for display in the repeat customer transaction counter.  
         [0017]     Additionally, during registration the seller is given the option of uploading a file of existing prior transactions including buyer IDs to initiate the seller&#39;s transaction database. The registration software can receive this optional file and place the uploaded buyer IDs from the file into the seller&#39;s transaction database in the appropriate buyer ID fields. The sum total of multiple instances of the same buyer ID in prior transactions becomes the seller&#39;s starting point for the cumulative count of existing repeat transactions for the seller.  
         [0018]     The seller provides for the system to receive transaction information from the seller&#39;s preferred market venue or the system may poll the market venue for transaction information for the seller.  
         [0019]     Once the seller completes registration his/her repeat customer counter is established.  
         [0020]     To display the repeat customer counter, the seller is given access to HTML text for inclusion on a web page or within an email. In the preferred embodiment, the access is given via an email sent to the buyer. Said email contains the HTML text.  
         [0021]     The HTML text, when placed onto a web page or within a HTML enabled email, calls the seller&#39;s repeat customer counter image to the target location. The seller can place the provided HTML text on the market venue&#39;s listing web page or on the seller&#39;s own e-commerce web site or within outbound HTML enabled emails. Subsequently, when the buyer opens their browser on the market venue seller&#39;s item listing page, or opens the browser on to the seller&#39;s e-commerce listing page or the buyer opens an email with an HTML enabled email reader, the HTML code initiates a call to the system and the updated image of the seller&#39;s repeat customer counter is presented within the web-pages or email.  
         [0022]     The system continually receives seller transaction information from the market venue or from the seller&#39;s e-commerce web site. Each transaction record is analyzed and stored in a seller transaction database. At a minimum, the transaction information includes the buyer ID. A software program evaluates if the buyer ID for the received transaction matches an existing buyer ID in the seller&#39;s database record. If so, the system increments the cumulative repeat customer transaction count in the seller&#39;s database record. If not, the buyer ID is recorded in the database as a first time buyer.  
         [0023]     Whenever the image hosting server receives a call from the HTML code, it presents the most updated repeat customer counter image to the appropriate calling web-page or email reader so that the buyer sees the most recent expression of prior buyer trust as evidenced by the cumulative repeat customer transactions with that seller.  
     
    
     BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS  
       [0024]     These and other features and advantages of the invention will now be described with reference to the drawings of certain preferred embodiments, which are intended to illustrate and not to limit the invention, and in which:  
         [0025]      FIGS. 1A and 1B  are high-level architectural drawings illustrating the primary components of a repeat customer transaction counter system for displaying a repeat customer transaction count as an image on a web-page or in an email.  
         [0026]      FIG. 2  is a block flow diagram illustrating the method in accordance with the invention.  
         [0027]      FIG. 3  is a diagram of information for a seller account record for use with one embodiment of the present invention  
         [0028]      FIGS. 4A-4B  are screen displays of the seller registration on-line form which is completed by the seller to create a seller database record.  
         [0029]      FIG. 5  is a sample repeat customer counter image display.  
         [0030]      FIG. 6  is a sample screen display of a market venue listing page with the repeat customer counter displayed.  
         [0031]      FIG. 7  is a sample buyer HTML-enabled email with the repeat customer counter displayed.  
     
    
     DETAILED DESCRIPTION  
       [0032]      FIG. 1A  is a high-level architectural drawing illustrating the primary components of a repeat customer transaction counter system for tracking an independent count of a seller&#39;s repeat customer transactions and to display that count on the seller&#39;s item selling web-pages or within outbound emails. The repeat customer transaction counter system includes a buyer computer  108 , a market venue web site  100 , a seller computer  170  and a repeat customer transaction system web site  106 , all of which are linked together by the Internet  104 .  
         [0033]     The buyer computer  108  may be any type of computing device that allows the buyer to receive and respond to emails  114  and interactively browse Web sites via a Web browser  112 . For example, the buyer computer  108  may be a personal computer (PC) that runs the Windows NT operating system and Netscape Navigator and which can access the Yahoo Mail email service at Yahoo.com.  
         [0034]     The preferred embodiment of this invention is a system and method for use with the Internet  104 , a widely known global computer network. This invention is, however, not limited to the Internet. Thus, as used herein, the term “network” refers to any distributed computer network whether it be a local area network (LAN), a wide area network (WAN), or an Intranet.  
         [0035]     The market venue web site  100  is a web site such as eBay.com, Amazon.com or Yahoo.com, which provides various functionality for allowing sellers to post listings for sale and for buyers to make offers to purchase said listings via a highest bid or a fixed price buying method over the Internet using their Web browser. Typically, the market venue web site  100  will be operated by a business entity that handles marketing functions to attract both buyer and seller to its site. The market venue web site  100  handles technical tasks to facilitate posting listings for sale, subsequent transaction processing including bid recording and final winning bid determination, reporting associated with the sale of almost anything between a buyer and seller and the presentation of a seller&#39;s web selling page  120  to a buyer. The market venue web site uses a web server  116  to send information as HTML web page displays, HTTP files, and emails to various entities, including the buyer computer  108 , the seller computer  170 , and the repeat customer transaction counter system  106 , over the internet  104  as is required to conduct appropriate transactions with each party.  
         [0036]     The repeat customer transaction counter system web site  106  advantageously includes a web server  132  and HTML documents  136 , a seller account database  152  and a seller image database  154  and multiple computer software programs  144  also shown in  FIG. 1B . As seen in  FIG. 1B , these comprise compose and send software  145 , transaction processing software  146  and registration software  147 .  
         [0037]     The seller computer  170  may be any type of computing device that allows the seller to interactively browse Web sites via a Web browser  174  and allows the seller to receive and respond to emails  118 . For example, the seller computer  170  may be a personal computer (PC) that runs the Windows 2000 operating system running Internet Explorer and accesses email through Microsoft Outlook.  
         [0038]      FIG. 2  is a general flow diagram of the method of this invention. Referring to this figure, the invention provides sellers with a mechanism to register for the repeat customer counter system. This activity is reflected as step  20  as detailed in the general flow diagram in  FIG. 2 . One embodiment of the marketing seller registration image  136  is illustrated in  FIG. 4A-4B . In the preferred embodiment of the invention, sellers are presented with both the opportunity to enter a self-verified existing cumulative repeat transaction count  990  and the opportunity to upload a file of buyer IDs from the seller&#39;s prior purchases  992 . If the seller only uploads a file of buyer IDs, the registration software  147  accepts the uploaded file and counts the total repeat buyer IDs in the file and places the sum of the buyer IDs into the seller cumulative repeat transaction count field  232  in the seller account database  152  and places unique buyer IDs into appropriate buyer ID fields  234 . In this way, the system is calculating both the total repeat transactions encompassed in the file and establishes a total prior buyer ID database to compare against future transactions. If, during registration, the seller enters only a self-verified existing cumulative repeat transaction count  990 , the entered number is placed by the registration software  147  in both the self-verified transaction count field  230  and the cumulative repeat transaction field  232 . If, during registration, the seller enters both a self-verified existing cumulative repeat transaction count  990  and uploads a file of IDs from all prior purchases  992 , the registration software  147  will place the entered self-verified existing cumulative transaction count number into the self verified transaction count field  230  in the seller account record database  152  and will accept the uploaded file and place the existing buyer IDs into buyer ID fields  234  and counts the total repeat buyer IDs and compares the count to the count in the self verified existing cumulative transaction count field  230  and places the larger of the two into the seller cumulative repeat transaction count field  232  in the seller account database  152 .  
         [0039]     Upon registration completion, the system creates the initial components of the seller&#39;s repeat customer transaction counter in a record within the system&#39;s seller image database  154  (Step  22 ). At step  24 , the system executes the compose and send email software program  145  to send the seller an email containing unique HTML text capable of calling the repeat customer counter image for the appropriate seller to a web page or HTML enabled email. The email creation executed by the compose and send email software  145  includes combining the seller&#39;s email address from the seller&#39;s contact information  210  along with pre-defined text from the HTML docs  136  and sending the email via the internet  104  to be read by the seller using the seller&#39;s email client  118 . At step  25 , the seller opens the email and copies and pastes the HTML text into the appropriate place on the seller&#39;s web selling page  120  or into the appropriate place within the seller&#39;s email client  114 .  
         [0040]     Subsequently, in Step  26 , whenever a buyer uses his/her web browser  112  to open a seller&#39;s web selling page  120  which includes the HTML text or whenever a buyer opens an HTML enabled email message which includes the HTML text by using his/her email client  114 , the system responds to the HTML text&#39;s call and the latest repeat customer transaction counter image is presented from within the seller image database  154  with the current cumulative repeat transaction count from the seller&#39;s transaction database  152  combined with appropriate HTML docs  136  and presented as the image through the web server  132  over the internet  104  to the correct calling location to display the repeat transaction counter of  FIG. 5  on a web page  FIG. 6  or in an email  FIG. 7 .  
         [0041]     The system subsequently tracks seller transactions by capturing seller transactions from the Market venue web site  100 , Step  28 . In one embodiment of the invention, at the close of every market venue transaction for a registered seller, the Market Venue web site  100  sends an electronic message over the internet  104  to the repeat customer transaction counter system web site server  132  where the system processes the received transaction using the transaction processing software  146 . In another embodiment, the transaction processing software  146  polls the market venue web server  116  over the internet  104  for any closed seller transactions. Once captured, at Step  30 , each transaction is processed by the transaction processing software  146 . In the preferred embodiment, the minimum transaction data captured is the buyer&#39;s market venue ID for the transaction. Alternatively, other transaction data, including purchase price, date and time of transaction, email address of the buyer, etc. are parsed and placed into appropriate corresponding fields in the seller account database  152 .  
         [0042]     At step  32 , the transaction processing software  146  evaluates if the buyer ID from the received transaction matches any existing buyer IDs in the buyer ID fields  234  in the seller&#39;s record in the sellers account database  152 . If no, Step  34 , the new buyer ID is added into the new buyer ID field  242  in the seller&#39;s record in the seller account database  152  and the system returns to step  28  to track further transactions. If, in Step  32 , a match is determined, the system moves to Step  36  and the seller&#39;s cumulative transaction count field  232  in the seller account database  152  is incremented by one. Next, the system returns to Step  26  to provide the latest cumulative repeat transaction counter image  FIG. 5  to the next HTML call stimulated by a viewing buyer.  
         [0043]      FIG. 3  is a diagram showing the types of information contained in a seller account record  200  in the seller account database  152 . Each seller record  200  contains a user name  202  and a password  204 , used to access the seller&#39;s account record. The account record also contains contact information  210 , the seller&#39;s market venue ID  208  and the seller&#39;s preferred market venue  212 . The account record  200  also contains billing information  220 .  
         [0044]     The self-verified repeat transaction count  230  contains a numeric count of the registering seller&#39;s self-verified repeat transactions entered during registration. The cumulative repeat transaction count  232  is the total count of repeat transactions determined during registration plus the total repeat transactions determined after registration in Step  32  from  FIG. 2 . The buyer ID set  234  for each seller account  200  may have zero or more unique buyer IDs  240 .  
         [0045]     One alternative envisioned for the invention is the substitution of a repeat customer clock to represent the same elements of a repeat customer counter. In this alternative to the invention, a clock representing the time since the last repeat customer purchase is displayed on the selling listing page in lieu of the repeat customer counter. The clock is refreshed to show the elapsed time since the most recent repeat customer purchase at each presentation to a potential buyer.  
         [0046]     It will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that numerous modifications and variations are possible, and that the invention may be practiced otherwise than as specifically described herein, without departing from the scope thereof.