Patent ID: 8719087

Claim:
A consolidated consumer rewards system comprising: a combination of hardware, software and communications devices operative to administer multiple consumer rewards programs of multiple merchants, the combination of hardware, software and communications devices comprising: a consumer rewards platform configured and programmed to maintain multiple unique consumer numbers which are used to automatically enroll multiple consumers in multiple consumer rewards programs of multiple merchants at a point of purchase of each merchant, and to account for purchasing activity which affects any of the multiple consumer rewards programs; the consumer rewards platform operatively connected to multiple consumer rewards programs, the consumer rewards programs having content which defines criteria for enrolling and rewarding consumers for purchases and maintaining records of demographic information, consumer purchasing and transaction history and awards activity; the consumer rewards platform configured to assign a unique consumer number to each consumer and to automatically enroll each consumer in a consumer rewards program at a point of sale of a merchant by reference to a unique consumer number, the unique consumer number used by the consolidated consumer rewards platform to track enrollment and purchasing activity of a consumer for processing by the consolidated consumer rewards platform; the consolidated consumer rewards platform further configured to automatically enroll multiple consumers in multiple consumer rewards programs at a merchant point of sale by reference to a unique consumer number in the consolidated consumer rewards platform and to match rewards from each of the consumer rewards programs of each of the multiple merchants to each enrolled consumer by transfer of information on consumer activity from the multiple merchant consumer rewards programs to the consolidated consumer rewards platform, the information on consumer activity being referenced to the corresponding unique consumer numbers for the consumer activity, whereby data content of the consolidated consumer rewards platform is altered by the consumer activity information received from the multiple merchant-consumer rewards platforms and can be accessed by the use of the unique consumer numbers; and the consolidated consumer rewards platform further configured to update consumer demographic information in the consolidated consumer rewards platform and to automatically provide updated consumer demographic information to each merchant consumer rewards program connected to the consolidated consumer rewards platform.