Patent ID: 6873968

Claim:
A system for managing an on-line virtual shopping cart which contains information about an item offered by a host merchant, comprising: a shopping cart manager that creates the virtual shopping cart and that detaches the virtual shopping cart prior to, or upon a shopper leaving a site of the host merchant to a different merchant's site; an extract and verify module that performs a comparison between a host merchant's offer for the item and an offer from the different merchant's site; a counter offer module that selectively requests a counter offer from the host merchant relative to the item; a validation module that automatically prepares a counter offer relative to an underbid offer from the different merchant's site; and the shopping cart manager automatically and selectively updates the item information in the virtual shopping cart to reflect the host merchant's counter offer, so that when the shopper returns to the host merchant's site for checkout, the shopper acquires the item at the host merchant's counter offer.