Patent ID: 7970661

Claim:
A collaborative e-shopping method comprising: establishing, using a computer processor, a shared shopping cart for use by a plurality of different collaborative shoppers; each of said collaborative shoppers individually and independently adding items from at least one e-commerce site via a shopper-specific browser interface to the shared shopping cart; each of said collaborative shoppers specifying a purchasing leeway for each of the items, wherein each purchasing leeway includes a deviation extent from specifics of the respective item added to the shared shopping cart; determining a transactional discount, wherein the discount is greater than a sum of transactional discounts that would have been applied if the shared shopping cart items were purchased separately as individual-specific discrete transactions; disproportionately allocating the transactional discount to each collaborative shopper so that collaborative shoppers with a greater purchasing leeway receive a higher portion of the discount than collaborative shoppers with a lesser purchasing leeway; at least one of said collaborative shoppers selecting a sale finalization action via their browser interface; responsive to the selection of the sale finalization action, confirming that each of the collaborative shoppers of the plurality elect to finalize a sale of the items in the shared shopping cart; in response to each of said collaborative shoppers finalizing the sale of the items in the shared shopping cart, purchasing the items in the shared shopping cart from the at least one e-commerce site; and shipping each of the purchased items of the shared shopping cart to addresses specified by the different collaborative shoppers.