Patent ID: 7299255

Claim:
A method for migrating product data within an electronic commerce system, comprising: monitoring requests for product data by users of a global content directory, the global content directory comprising: a directory structure comprising a plurality of product classes organized in a hierarchy, each product class categorizing a plurality of products and defining one or more attributes of the products categorized in the product class; and one or more pointers associated with each product class, each pointer identifying a seller database in which product data enabling a product transaction is stored for products associated with the product class; generating a request history for each of the users based on a prediction from the request history, the request history comprises the number of requests by each of the users that result in the user accessing a particular seller database; identifying the location of a particular user; determining, based at least in part on the request history for the particular user and a relative size of an organization associated with the particular user, whether some or all of the product data requested by the particular user should be migrated from a seller database to a storage location that is located closer to the identified location of the particular user than the seller database, the determination is based at least in part on the number of times the particular user has requested the product data within a specified period of time; and initiating the migration of some or all of the product data requested by the particular user from the seller database to the storage location, determined for the particular user, that is located closer to the identified location of the particular user than the seller database.