Patent ID: 7272573

Claim:
A method for enabling an on-line merchant to tailor a response to a shopper's on-line interrogation, said software comprising: ranking products of the on-line merchant using a Rank Factor Score (RFS) at least partially based on a count of hits to product descriptions in the merchants database by an on-line request of the shopper specifying characteristics of a product desired by the shopper including using other weighting factors in the ranking for taking into account other adjustments to tailor a presentation, the other ranking factors including factors for a customer's buying preferences and product popularity; modifying the ranking of at least one of the merchants products ranked by the ranking factors, which modification is by a weighting factor based on a marketing strategy of the merchant so that the ranking is in accordance with the following formula: R= 1 −n ( RFS )+n (SWF) where: RFS is a Rank Score Factor n is a number less than 1 representing a proportion of the adjustment applied to the SWF weighting factor SWF=is the Strategic Weighting Factor for the merchants marketing strategy R=Rank; and transmission software for providing to the shopper the presentation of products that presents the products in order of rank determined by both the initial ranking and the modification of at least one of the merchants products.